KARACHI: Pakistan and China are holding a virtual meeting of the 13th Joint Cooperation Committee (JCC) on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) today, Friday, with the security of Chinese organizations and personnel working in the South Asian nation expected to be at the top of the agenda. 
China is a major ally and investor in Pakistan but both separatist and other militants have attacked Chinese projects over recent years and killed Chinese personnel, including five Chinese workers who perished in a suicide attack Mar. 26 while they were on their way to the Dasu hydropower project in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The hydropower project falls under the ambit of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship of China’s Belt and Road Initiative through which it has pledged more than $65 billion for road, rail and other infrastructure developments in the South Asian nation of 241 million people.
Beijing has also over the years readily provided financial assistance to bail out its often-struggling neighbor, including in July last year when China granted Pakistan a two-year rollover on a $2.4 billion loan, giving the debt-saddled nation much-needed breathing space as it tackled a balance-of-payments crisis.
“The 13th Joint Cooperation Committee (JCC) meeting of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has formally started with a one-minute silence in honor of the Chinese officials who lost their lives in a recent suicide bomb blast,” Pakistan’s planning ministry said in a statement on X.
“Chinese workers in Pakistan are heroes of Pakistan, whose contributions significantly support the realization of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor initiative.”
The JCC is the main decision-making body for CPEC, which convenes annually. The MoU to launch CPEC was signed between Pakistan and China on July 5, 2013. Pakistan has said more than 50 projects worth $25 billion under the CPEC umbrella have been completed since. 
But Chinese projects and interests have also increasingly come under attack in recent years. The Dasu assault in March was the third major one in a little over a week on China’s interests and followed a Mar. 20 attack on a strategic port used by China in the southwestern province of Balochistan, where Beijing has poured billions of dollars into infrastructure projects, and a Mar. 25 assault on a naval air base, also in the southwest. 
Both attacks were claimed by the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), the most prominent of several separatist groups in Balochistan.
Dasu, the site of a major dam, has been attacked in the past, with a bus blast in 2021 killing 13 people, nine Chinese among them, although no group claimed responsibility, like the Mar. 26 bombing.
Pakistan is home to twin insurgencies, one mounted by religiously-motivated militants and the other by ethnic separatists who seek secession, blaming the government’s inequitable division of natural resources in southwestern Balochistan province.
Chinese interests are mostly under attack primarily by ethnic militants seeking to push Beijing out of mineral-rich Balochistan, but that area is far from the site of the Mar. 26 bombing.
On Thursday, Pakistan’s top economic body approved $2.5 million in compensation for families of Chinese workers who were killed in the Mar. 26 Dasu attack.

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan government is considering modifying its passport policy for married and divorced women, a senior official said on Thursday, after a lawyer petitioned a local court against the requirement to include the husband’s name on the travel document. 
Lawyer Khadija Bukhari has pointed out the contrition in the policies of the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) and the Directorate General Immigration & Passports (DGIP) regarding married women.
The former allows women to retain their father’s name even after marriage while updating their marital status on their Computerized National Identity Card (CNIC), but the passport authority has made it mandatory to change the name from father to husband. However, because the passport is made on the basis of NADRA data, a woman who has not switched to her husband’s name on her CNIC must get a new CNIC made reflecting the change before she can be issued a new passport.
Speaking to Arab News, Bukhari said she had her husband’s name included in her CNIC data in order for their marriage to be registered with NADRA, but later decided to retain her father’s name in the second column of her CNIC.
“So, there was no problem with that. But once I went to the passport office when my passport expired, they said, ‘We cannot renew your passport because your CNIC has not been updated’,” she told Arab News.
“By that it was meant that ‘You’re supposed to be wife of someone, you cannot remain a daughter if you want to get a passport. So first go back to NADRA, get your CNIC changed and reflect that you are the wife of someone and then we will process your application’.”
Bukhari argued that if NADRA didn’t have a problem with women retaining their father’s name then why did the passport authority have a separate policy. 
Immigration and Passports Director-General Mustafa Jamal Kazi told Arab News it was currently a “legal requirement” for a married woman to have her husband’s name on her passport as the document was used internationally and must comply with international agreements, unlike NADRA-issued CNICs that were used only in Pakistan.
“These rules are driven through the act of parliament and secretary interior has constituted a committee under his chairmanship to solve this issue. The committee will look into the passport policy concerning the condition of a married woman’s passport bearing her husband’s name instead of her father’s name,” Kazi said. 
“The committee was tasked with addressing discrepancies between the policies of the National Database and Registration Authority and the passport issuing authority regarding married women.”
Kazi said the solution to the problem, which he also intended to present to the government committee, was to add another column to the passport to include the name of a woman’s ex-husband, the father of their children, in case of divorce.
“We need all the details in our database because for international verifications different countries send the data of Pakistani citizens to us and we need to verify from every aspect,” he said. 
“Therefore, we need all the information and concealing facts can cause problems for them [women] at a later stage.”