Pakistan's China question
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This week, Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan will arrive on a three day visit to Beijing. In the ritualistic before departure meeting with a group of Chinese journalists, the Prime Minister called out western countries for their double standards on human rights and for repeatedly raising the Uyghurs issue while remaining silent about Indian atrocities against nine million Kashmiris living in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Khan said his ambassador had found that the human rights situation on the ground in China was different from the West’s negative portrayal. All this, in the spirit of solidarity at a time when the US has led a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics. The lineup of leaders attending and those boycotting the Olympics reads like a list of China’s geo-strategic friends and allies vs. its adversaries. Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the five Central Asian republics will attend, while US, UK, Australia and India will not attend.
The world is witnessing a replay of the mid-20th century Cold War but one edging towards becoming a hot war. In an unprecedented move, China’s ambassador to Washington, Qin Gang said on US National Public Radio that the Taiwan issue was “the biggest tinderbox between China and the United States.”
This hard talk can be a harbinger of tough talk and even tougher military action. While China reinforces its presence and claim in the South China Sea, the US dangerously climbs the escalation ladder by conducting military exercises in the sea while encouraging Taiwan’s antagonism towards Beijing by providing military and diplomatic support to Taiwan.
It is against this potentially volatile geostrategic backdrop that Pakistan-China relations are on the global radar, like perhaps never before. In Islamabad, western diplomats have their ears close to official strategic chats. They are often seeking answers to a rather naïve question… who will Pakistan ‘choose’ between China and the US?
When Prime Minister Imran Khan meets his host President Xi Jinping behind closed doors, above all the two leaders will seek to reinforce abiding trust between the two historical allies.
Nasim Zehra
This indeed is the question uppermost in the global strategic community’s mind as they examine Pakistan and China relations. Pakistan continues to be China’s principal strategic ally cushioning it, to some extent, against any current and future US-led military encirclement and containment plans.
Significantly, Pakistan's cushioning of China from encirclement or containment is an off-shoot of the security infrastructure set up by Pakistan to protect its own geo-strategic and national security interests.
Two factors illustrate this point. Pakistan currently finds itself located in a geostrategic zone vastly different from what it was in the 1950’s. Back then, neither was the cold war playing out in Pakistan's immediate neighborhood nor had there been an Indo-US strategic alliance directly undermining Pakistan's security-- and nor had Pakistan-China become strategic allies. Now in protecting itself against Indian hegemony manifested through India’s military buildup, through the Modi government’s rejection to resolve outstanding issues from Siachin to Sir Creek and above all to annex and divide Jammu and Kashmir, for Pakistan the strategic alliance with China inevitably acquires greater significance.
Secondly, given the geopolitical context within which Pakistan is located, Pakistan seeks to promote its national interest, to ensure its security and not seek to balance relations between China and the US. Balancing holds no intrinsic value. The context and related requirements determine the value of balancing. For example, while being part of the Cold War and a member of cold war pacts, including SEATO and CENTO, Pakistan avoided active participation even remotely in Washington’s Korean battle.
Interestingly, Pakistan's policy of not being in any one camp was convincingly manifested through the key role that Pakistan played in the historic China-US opening in July 1971. While Pakistan has stayed the course of ideologically opting for non-alignment, the decade of the 60’s set the tone for new alignments within the region and beyond. Those initial tentative trends have now become the dominant global trends being played out in Asia. The trends created by the evolving China-India tension meandering through multiple phases finally climaxed in the Galwan Valley in June 2020 leaving Indian soldiers dead. The theatre for this encounter was around the UN acknowledged disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir which India illegally merged into the Indian Union in August 2019.
Nevertheless, in the current situation with Pakistan having experienced in the last two decades particularly, the pincer squeeze, from its eastern and western borders engineered by India and deliberately ignored by the United States, it will inevitably bank on trust-based security alliances. China has proven to be most beneficial for Pakistan. No alliance can be perfect since alliances must serve interests of two independent entities and require negotiation and compromise. As the architecture of Pakistan-China alliance spreads across diplomatic, economic, military and political zones, new questions will arise, some complex. They will need skill, trust and patience from both sides to arrive at mutually acceptable answers.
Against this backdrop then, to frame Pakistan's strategic policy as one that seeks to balance its relations with China and the US is misleading. It defies the fundamental logic of geostrategic relations which for Pakistan dictates that its China question is about promoting Pakistan's economic, security and diplomatic interests and protecting it from the consistent fallout of a tightening US-Indian strategic embrace that actively ignores, if not undermines, Pakistan's security and economic interests. Similarly, China sees its multiple interests protected and promoted in its deepening strategic ties with Pakistan.
Hence, when Prime Minister Imran Khan meets his host President Xi Jinping behind closed doors, above all the two leaders will seek to reinforce abiding trust between the two historical allies. This relationship is not transactional, the two partners don’t look for quid pro quos. Instead, it addresses the economic and security concerns of both sides. That clearly will be the take away from the Prime Minister’s China visit: trust reinforced and greater multi-sectoral engagement.
- Nasim Zehra is an author, analyst and national security expert.
Twitter: @NasimZehra
