New fighter jets to be built in Pakistan with Chinese cooperation?

NEW YORK/ISLAMABAD: Pakistani Air Force and Chinese officials are putting the final touches on a plan to expand Pakistan’s building of Chinese fighter jets, weaponry and other hardware, The New York Times reported Thursday in a long dispatch claiming that Beijing’s Belt and Road plan was taking a “military turn”.

The dispatch said that the newspaper had “reviewed” the confidential plan which it says also envisages the cooperation between China and Pakistan in space. “All those military projects were designated as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a $1 trillion chain of infrastructure development programmes stretching across some 70 countries, built and financed by Beijing,” Times’ correspondent Maria Abi-Habib wrote from Islamabad.

Pointing out that Chinese officials had insisted that the Belt and Road was purely an economic project with peaceful intent, the Times said, “But with its plan for Pakistan, China is for the first time explicitly tying a Belt and Road proposal to its military ambitions.”

The Deputy Chief of Mission at the Chinese Embassy Islamabad Lijian Zhao in a tweet termed the article “Joke of the year,” and said “It was the western countries which pushed Pakistan into that trap.” He described it as “an article full of wrong numbers and lies.