Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng is visiting Islamabad to join a ceremony to mark 10 years of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project.
The 3,000-kilometer-long CPEC corridor starts from China's Kashi and ends at Pakistan's Gwadar, and connects the Silk Road Economic Belt in the north and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road in the south. It is a trade network of highways, railways, pipelines and optical cables, and a flagship project under the Belt and Road Initiative. With an investment totaling US$45 billion, construction of the CPEC is scheduled to be completed by 2030.
As the chairman of China's National Development and Reform Commission from 2017 to 2023, Lifeng was instrumental in the planning and execution of multiple CPEC projects in Pakistan.
According to Foreign Office Lifeng's visit was a part of regular high-level exchanges and dialogue between Pakistan and China and reflected the importance attached by both countries to further deepen their "all-weather strategic cooperative partnership, enhance economic and financial cooperation, advance high-quality development of CPEC and explore new avenues for strengthening trade and investment ties".
At the same time, Global Times said that China and Pakistan, all-weather
strategic cooperation partners, have enhanced comprehensive cooperation under
the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) during the past 10 years.
The CPEC is a flagship of the BRI, which has
helped improve Pakistani people's livelihood, and created many jobs for locals,
experts were quoted by GT as saying while noting that Western countries'
disparaging CPEC won't conceal Chinese enterprises' contribution to Pakistan
nor hurt the iron-clad friendship of the two neighbors.
Gwadar Port
One of the watershed developments during the 10
years was the high-octane operation of Gwadar Port, crown jewel of the CPEC.
Gwadar was once an old fishing town, and now it is
on a high tide of success with tangible socioeconomic progress, including the
establishment of free trade zones there, the Eastbay Express Way, and
inauguration of the New International Gwadar Airport.
Zhang Baozhong, former chairman of China Overseas
Ports Holding Co, told the Global Times that with the improvement of local
ports and infrastructure including hospitals, airports and schools, Gwadar has
now been transformed to a modern seaside city with a permanent resident
population that grew from 80,000 in 2013 to 220,000 in 2023.
Zhang said his company aims to build Gwadar into a
smart port city by 2050 with a total population of more than 1.7 million and an
annual GDP of $30 billion.
The Peshawar-Karachi Motorway (PKM), the largest transportation project
under the CPEC, was completed in 2019. The project gave priority to hiring
Pakistani employees, providing more than 23,000 local jobs, according to a
statement China State Construction sent to the Global Times.
The PKM project has also helped propel the
development of services industries such as catering, retailing and
transportation, indirectly creating more than 45,000 jobs.
PowerChina has completed the construction of 22
wind power projects in Pakistan, with a total installed capacity of 1.14
million kilowatts.
Six BRI Corridors
The BRI has six main economic corridors: (1) the New Eurasian Land Bridge; (2) the China-Central Asia-West Asia Corridor; (3) the China-Pakistan Corridor; (4) the Bangladesh-China- Myanmar Corridor; (5) the China-Mongolia-Russia Corridor; (6) the China-Indochina Peninsula Corridor.
According to U.S. think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, to date, 147 countries accounting for two-thirds of the world's population and 40 percent of global GDP have signed on to projects or indicated an interest in doing so.
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