The initial enthusiasm for the nearly US$30bn that China injected into Pakistan has now vanished. Rather, CPEC has become entangled in Pakistani domestic politics, even as the BRI has transformed Pakistan and its future.   

10 years ago, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), one of the six corridors of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), was in full swing. Infrastructure and energy projects were agreed between the two sides, and there was a sense, especially in Pakistan, that CPEC could have a transformational impact on the country’s political and economic future. The Pakistani leadership at the time dubbed CPEC as a “game changer,” and the eyes of China watchers all around the world turned to Pakistan to see how Chinese investments were going to play out in a country with a complex domestic political and security environment, but whose bilateral relations with Beijing matched no other.    

Fast forward to the Autumn of 2024 and the mood has drastically changed. Since 2018, and more markedly since the COVID-19 pandemic, CPEC has progressively gone quiet. This was partly because of China’s own economic slowdown and inward recalibration of its economic policy, but partly also because of Pakistan’s financial struggles and a precarious security environment in parts of the country. Importantly, no significant project has been added to the CPEC portfolio in recent years. Conversations between the Chinese leaders and their Pakistani counterparts have moved from discussing infrastructure projects to ensuring the security of Chinese nationals following a series of attacks by insurgent groups that targeted CPEC projects and workers.  

To be sure, CPEC has delivered on some of its initial promises. Connectivity projects under CPEC in the provinces of Punjab and Sindh, as well as the East Bay Expressway in Balochistan have reduced travel times in the areas touched by these projects. Equally important, nine new power plants with a combined capacity of over 5,000 MW were built between 2015 and 2020, helping to ease the nationwide energy shortfall and, at least initially, solving the problem of “load-shedding”—when a temporary disconnection from the electricity grid brings demand in line with supply. However, long-running underinvestment in local grids has meant that the new power supply cannot be delivered equally throughout the country, exacerbating the rural-urban and centre-periphery divides in energy access.  

More generally, we can observe two macro-trends that CPEC has set in motion. The first is the creation of new bureaucratic mechanisms to coordinate and implement CPEC, an outcome which has exemplified the transformation of state structures and institutions in BRI host countries. In the case of CPEC, the Joint Cooperation Committee (JCC) is the primary venue for the negotiations between Pakistan and China. The committee is co-chaired by the Pakistani minister of Planning, Development, and Special Initiatives and the vice chairman of China’s National Development and Reform Commission. Several joint working groups (for example on Gwadar, energy, and transport infrastructure) convene in between the JCC meetings and make recommendations to the full committee. This new bureaucratic body was created exclusively to deal with CPEC projects, and it epitomises in many ways the need for new institutional structures supporting the design and implementation of BRI projects. 

A second trend is the overall inequitable distribution of CPEC projects, with Sindh and Punjab provinces hosting more projects (both energy and infrastructure) than the other provinces. While some of these decisions can be explained by the location of resources in particular provinces rather than others (such as the Thar coal fields in Sindh), many others are obviously political, such as the removal of budget allocations for the province of Balochistan and the concentration of projects in Punjab. This has caused some political backlash due to a sense of marginalisation from the smaller provinces, often vocally aired in national media.   

From China’s perspective, the backlash was not expected given the bonhomie between the two sides, and an overwhelmingly positive public opinion favouring Pakistan’s engagement with China. But beyond the challenges faced in Pakistan, the long-term significance of CPEC lies in how China will apply these lessons to the BRI as a whole. From managing a volatile security environment and threats to its assets and nationals, to dealing with public opinion at the national and local levels, CPEC has led to the development of new tools and methods in response to the challenges that the Pakistani context has presented. Accordingly, Pakistan is not just a fascinating case study for how the BRI is transforming recipient states, but also an example of how increased exposure to these environments is changing China’s practices. 

Overall, China’s encounters with Pakistan under CPEC illustrate that the BRI is best understood as an interactive process between China and its international partners, which is producing interdependent relations between them. Contrary to prevalent narratives about China’s engagement with partners as simply reshaping the world to its liking and imposing its strategic designs on subservient countries, China’s interactions with countries, globally, is the product of complex negotiations, a source of unexpected setbacks and frustrations, and China has had to adapt its approach to navigate those challenges. A global China is therefore one connected to, and interdependent with, the world, and the BRI is not just a one-way street.  

This article is based on data and analysis from the author’s recent, co-edited manuscript, “China-Pakistan and the Belt and Road Initiative” and from the journal article “Global China and Pakistan’s federal politics: 10 years of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.”    

Dr Filippo Boni is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the Open University in the UK.  He is the author of Sino-Pakistani Relations: Politics, Military and Regional Dynamics (Routledge, 2019), and the co-editor of the recently published volume China, Pakistan and the Belt and Road Initiative. The experience of an early adopter state (Routledge 2024).  You can follow him @FilippoBoni1. 

This review is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.