China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Views from along the Silk Road

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has been billed as the “flagship project” of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), constituting the most expansive package of Chinese investments to be set in motion under its auspices to date.^[1] The headline numbers cited by the Pakistani government—$46 billion after CPEC’s launch in 2015, rising to $51 billion after the agreement of additional projects in September 2016—may err on the high side, but by late 2016 even the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ more conservative estimates of activities moving forward on the ground already totaled $14 billion.^[2] The scale and nature of CPEC, incorporating energy projects, rail and road connections, infrastructure development, and industrial zones, make it one of the only so-called corridors that genuinely seems to match the purported ambitions of Xi Jinping’s scheme. In the florid language of Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister: “If ‘One Belt, One Road’ is like a symphony involving and benefiting every country, then construction of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is the sweet melody of the symphony’s first movement.”^[1]

That Pakistan should occupy such a prominent role in the initiative is surprising. Despite deep political and security ties between China and Pakistan, trade and investment has long been a weak element in the relationship, with a cautionary history of similarly grand announcements failing to translate into effect. One RAND study found that between 2001 and 2011, while $66 billion of Chinese investments in Pakistan were cumulatively announced, only 6 percent of these were ever actually realized.^[1]