Islamabad, Pakistan
Expressing concern over Pakistan’s growing instability, the visiting Chinese foreign minister told the host country to overcome political differences to pave the way for economic progress.
Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang was in Pakistan on Saturday for the fourth Pakistan-China Foreign Ministers’ Strategic Dialogue held in Islamabad. It was Qin’s first visit to the country since becoming Beijing’s top diplomat.
“We sincerely hope that Pakistan’s political forces will build consensus, maintain stability and more effectively address internal and external challenges so that they can focus on growing the economy,” Qin said at a press conference alongside with his Pakistani counterpart, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, after the strategic talks behind closed doors.
Pakistan has been facing intense political turmoil since former Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted in a parliamentary no-confidence vote a year ago. The lack of consensus between Khan’s party and the 13-party ruling alliance led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif over the election calendar has plunged the country into a political and constitutional crisis.
The country is also mired in a crippling financial crisis. To help Pakistan revive a stalled bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund and avoid default, China has provided relief through debt recovery and parking funds there to boost dangerously low foreign exchange reserves.
Qin said his country “will continue to do its best to support Pakistan’s foreign exchange and financial stability.”
Pakistan’s former envoy to the United Kingdom, the United States and the UN, Maleeha Lodhi, told VOA that her country would have failed without China coming to the rescue.
“It was China’s decision to renew even commercial loans to Pakistan that has helped keep Pakistan afloat financially. So China’s help has been extremely vital in helping Pakistan, at least maintain its [foreign exchange] reservations,” said Lodhi.
China is also Pakistan’s single largest lender, but the South Asian nation owes a third of its external debt to Beijing. This debt has skyrocketed since the launch of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor 10 years ago. Known as CPEC, the multibillion-dollar infrastructure and development project is part of China’s global Belt and Road Initiative.
By not offering full-scale debt forgiveness to Pakistan, policy expert and former adviser to the Pakistani government Mosharraf Zaidi said Beijing was telling Pakistan to better manage its own affairs.
“[The] The Chinese, I think, will continue to insist that we will not let you fail completely, but we will not support mismanagement and bad governance, which is really what Pakistan has done in the last year and a half in particular,” Zaidi said at VOA..
Both foreign ministers rejected the perception that Pakistan is a victim of “debt trap diplomacy” and claims that China is targeting struggling economies through unsustainable loans to achieve its geostrategic goals.
“There is no basis in the so-called debt sustainability, debt trap … concerns that are spreading. Chinese investment and financial support … are in line with the traditions of our unique and time-tested friendship time,” Bhutto Zardari told reporters.
“For those who make false suggestions about the debt trap,” Qin said in a veiled reference to Washington’s criticism of China’s investment pattern, “I suggest you ask these people, ‘What have they done for the national development and welfare of China. Pakistani people?”
The US is Pakistan’s largest export market, followed by China.
Along with Pakistan’s economic and political instability, the security of its citizens is a major concern for China.
Despite multi-layered security protecting Chinese projects in Pakistan, including a special military unit, Chinese workers have faced deadly attacks from militant groups that oppose the Pakistani state or see Chinese projects as an extension of what they consider an invasion of their resources by the state.
Qin said his Pakistani counterpart had shared “Pakistan’s meticulous arrangements to protect China’s citizens, institutions and projects in Pakistan. Our two sides agreed to pursue and bring to justice the perpetrators of terrorist attacks against the Chinese.”
Last November, a Pakistani anti-terrorism court sentenced to death two men accused of killing 13 people, including nine Chinese engineers working on a hydroelectric project, in a July 2021 suicide attack.
During his brief stay in Pakistan, China’s top diplomat participated in trilateral talks with his Pakistani and Afghan counterparts. The Afghan Taliban’s interim foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, who faces travel restrictions from the United Nations, was granted a waiver to come to Islamabad.
Bhutto Zardari noted that for Pakistan, the central issue with Afghanistan is terrorism, which he described as a “red line”.
Pakistan blames Kabul for failing to curb terrorists present on its soil who have been mounting almost daily attacks on Pakistani security personnel.
As China deepens its interests in Afghanistan, Qin said ahead of the trilateral talks, he hoped “Pakistan and Afghanistan will consider the big picture and try to solve each other’s problems through dialogue and the query”.
Qin’s visit to Pakistan follows the visit of Pakistan’s army chief to Beijing just over a week ago and a bilateral political consultation in March. The two heads of state met in China last November.
A recent Washington Post report on US intelligence leaks revealed that Pakistani officials sought to distance the country from the US on key issues to avoid damaging its relationship with China.
Alongside Pakistan’s foreign minister, China’s top diplomat lashed out at the United States, saying at one point that Beijing and Islamabad would continue to work together to “oppose the Cold War mentality, the game of zero sum”.
On the challenges of balancing relations with two competing global powers, former Pakistani envoy Lodhi told VOA, “Pakistan has made it clear that it will not be part of any anti-China coalition that the United States is doing all the possible to mobilize the whole world.”
In the opinion of policy expert Zaidi, however, Islamabad’s compulsion is to maintain strategic ties with China and strengthen its weak relationship with the US because Pakistan is “too big to pick sides, but it is also too small to pick a side successfully.”
