China takes the initiative

It is becoming ever clearer that the relationship between Pakistan and China stretches far beyond the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and mutual cultural exchanges. China has an agenda in the sub-continent and sub-Saharan Africa that extends up into the states of Central Asia. It is engaged in a vast decades-long project that will establish a Chinese regional hegemon like nothing the Russians or the Americans ever achieved, and in the process is going to impact upon perhaps several of the world’s more intractable conflicts, one of those being the eternal battle between Pakistan and India.

The old colonial power has little or no part to play in the current scenario and America wanes. Russia is toe-in-water again but it is China that is the player. Careful observers will have noted an address by the Chinese envoy to India recently in which he said that “some Indian friends” had proposed a trilateral summit involving India, Pakistan and China. The envoy went on to say that international differences “have to be managed and controlled through cooperation” and that boundary questions, a veiled reference to Kashmir, “was a leftover by history.” There was even a suggestion that mutually-acceptable solutions and not just to the Kashmir problem may be sought and found through Special Representatives meetings.

Chinese officials at this level of seniority do not make remarks like this off the cuff, not when there are reporters hanging on every word. There will have been back-channel activity as a precursor to the words the envoy used. Also of note the envoy said that there is a joint Sino-Indian programme to train Afghan bureaucrats and diplomats — information hardly likely to delight the Pakistan Foreign Office which is ever suspicious of Indian moves in the Afghan direction. The SCO and BRICS were also referenced, both areas where China has a close interest. All of which comes at a time when in operational terms Pakistan is on ‘pause’ as the election approaches. The incoming government is going to need to hit the ground running in respect of foreign policy, having stumbled badly for the last five years.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 19^th, 2018.

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