Alarm bells over Chinese aid to Pakistan

CHINA is lavishing vast amounts of aid on a small Pakistani fishing town to win over locals and build a commercial deep-water port that the US and India suspect may also one day serve the Chinese navy.

Beijing has built a school, sent doctors and pledged about $500 million in grants for an airport, hospital, college and badly needed water infrastructure for Gwadar, a dusty town whose harbour juts out into the Arabian Sea, overlooking some of the world’s busiest oil and gas shipping lanes.

The grants include $230m for a new international airport, one of the largest such disbursements China has made abroad, say researchers and Pakistani officials.

The handouts are a departure from Beijing’s usual approach in other countries. China has traditionally derided Western-style aid in favour of infrastructure projects for which it normally provides loans through Chinese state-owned commercial and development banks.

“The concentration of grants is quite striking,” said Andrew Small, author of a book on China-Pakistan relations and a Washington-based researcher at the German Marshall Fund think-tank. “China largely doesn’t do aid or grants, and when it has done them, they have tended to be modest.” US suspicious Pakistan has welcomed the aid with open hands, but Beijing’s largesse has fuelled suspicions in the US and India that Gwadar is part of China’s future geostrategic plans to challenge US naval dominance.

“It all suggests that Gwadar, for a lot of people in China, is not just a commercial proposition over the longer term,” Small said.

The Chinese Foreign Min- istry did not respond request for comment.

Beijing and Islamabad see Gwadar as the future jewel in the crown of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship of Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative to build a new “Silk Road” of land and maritime trade routes across more than 60 countries in Asia, Europe and Africa.

The plan is to turn it into a trans-shipment hub and megaport to be built alongside economic zones from which export industries will ship goods worldwide.

Since 2014, Beijing has pledged over $800m in grants. – Reuters