CPEC — an engine for Pakistan’s economic turnaround

LAHORE: As Islamabad and Beijing commemorated the 10th anniversary of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) on Monday, the first phase of this grand initiative has so far added 6,040 megawatts of electricity, about 886 kilometers of transmission lines and 510 kilometers of highways in Pakistan, research shows.

According to Chinese Ambassador Nong Rong, “The CPEC has brought a total of $25.4 billion direct investment to Pakistan, paid $2.12 billion in taxes and created 192,000 jobs for the Pakistani people.”

The CPEC Independent Power Producers (IPPs) provide nearly 25 per cent of the electricity supply to Pakistan at its peak, greatly alleviating power shortages and laying a solid foundation for Pakistan’s socio-economic development.

The under-construction Gwadar International Airport is the largest single foreign aid project of China so far. China has also provided a total of 7,000 sets of solar panels for households in Gwadar over the past two years. Another 10,000 sets of solar panels are under active preparation and will be allocated to poor people in Balochistan.

The CPEC was launched on April 20, 2015, when the visiting Chinese President, Xi Jinping, and the-then Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif signed 51 agreements and memorandums of understanding valued at $46 billion.

In 2015, it was announced that Gwadar city and port would be further developed under CPEC at a cost of $1.62 billion with the aim of linking northern Pakistan and western China to probably the deepest seaport on the planet. The port was also deemed to be the site of a floating liquefied natural gas facility, which was part of the larger $2.5 billion Gwadar-Nawabshah segment of the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline. Construction in this context had begun in June 2016 on the Gwadar Special Economic Zone, which was planned to be built on a 2,292-acre site adjacent to the port.

During Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s visit to China in November 2022, Pakistan requested China to roll over its $6.3 billion debt. While both sides had decided to launch a $10 billion high-speed rail project linking Karachi to Peshawar, Beijing had agreed to export technology for a 160km/hour high-speed railway train to Pakistan.

Earlier, in its April 22, 2015 edition, the China Daily had written: “The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is a 3,000-kilometer network of roads, railways and pipelines to transport oil and gas from southern Pakistan’s Gwadar Port to Kashgar city, northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. Proposed by Premier Li.”

The Encyclopedia Britannica maintained: “The goal of the CPEC is both to transform Pakistan’s economy—by modernizing its road, rail, air, and energy transportation systems—and to connect the deep-sea Pakistani ports of Gwadar and Karachi to the Xinjiang Uygur Region in China and beyond by overland routes. Xinjiang borders Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. The ancient Silk Road also runs through its territory. This aims to reduce the time and cost of transporting goods and energy such as natural gas to China by circumventing the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea.”