Hate-driven US strategy on CPEC won't divide China and Pakistan

By: Azhar Azam

*This is one of my opinion pieces (unedited) that first appeared at "China Global Television Network (CGTN)":
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2019-11-24/Hate-driven-U-S-strategy-on-CPEC-won-t-divide-China-and-Pakistan-LSyG8I3lDi/index.html

United States is desperately trying to somehow blow up China’s economic, political, strategic, trade and technology interests across the world. Internationally, it has reached out to its allies seeking support to impair Chinese regional and global interests.

In pursuit of its maligned campaign against China domestically, Washington has taken several hurtful measures against Beijing such as tariffs on Chinese goods and restrictions on it technology companies and additionally stepped up its labors to blame China by interfering in its internal Hong Kong affairs.

The latest US’ China-targeted move surfaced on Thursday after the US top diplomat for South Asia Alice Wells shockingly warned Pakistan that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) would push the country into deeper and steeper Chinese debt burden, nurture corruption and oust its jobs and profits to Beijing.

In her “unusually specific” speech, Wells augured that China’s CPEC and non-CPEC loans were “going to take a growing toll on the Pakistan economy” and even if the repayments were deferred, they would hangover Pakistan economic development potential and cramp Prime Minister Imran Khan’s reform agenda.

US knocked the wrong door this time to implement its hate-driven strategy. When it comes to China, Pakistan would be the last country in the world to even thinking about Beijing to blow its economy, overstretch nation’s debt and pinch native employments or revenues.

Relationship between China and Pakistan is not confined to CPEC only, which is only one though critical pedigree of greater Sino-Pak cooperation. Otherwise, the two countries are entwined in much wider and most focal areas of social, economic, trade, defense and strategic collaboration.

This unique, deep-rooted and peerless partnership between the two republics, modeled as iron brothers, is friction-free and shock-proof. In a tailored era where all the nations are pursuing their commercial and premeditated interests – the people, governments and armed forces of China and Pakistan set a new specimen of communal, administrative and military understanding based on mutual trust and concord.

Islamabad is a largely an import-based economy and since the South Asian country has struggled to increase its exports in the last five years, the ballooning current account and trade deficit has put immense pressure on its foreign exchange reserves so as the ability to repay foreign debts. CPEC, purely a transportation project, cannot be convoluted with Pakistan’s weakened liquidity position.

Out of 22 CPEC-related projects worth of $18.9 billion as of December 2018, more than $12 billion were investments in energy sector to ease its power shortage and only $5.9 billion were provided to Pakistan by China as loans over a period of five years on concessional rates to improve its infrastructure network.  While Pakistan’s foreign debt amounted to about $107 billion on 30-September 2019, the Chinese loans accounted for nearly 5.5% of the country’s total external debt.

Wells claim of CPEC repatriating Pakistani jobs and profits to China is forged as well. So far, only the CPEC energy projects had generated $250 million in tax revenues to Pakistan and provided 10,000 jobs to the nationals as well as adding 14.5% to the total energy output.

Ambassador Wells also accused that the lack of transparency can inflate costs of CPEC projects and foster corruption. She hypothetically attached transparency of the energy projects with corruption and presented no evidence whatsoever to back her allegations.

Amid a robust accountability campaign being run by the current Khan administration in Pakistan, which jailed the former president, prime ministers, and federal and provincial ministers, Pakistan’s National Accountability Bureau (NAB) did not find a single evidence of corruption in CPEC and related projects.

As a matter of fact, the US meddled in Pakistani domestic issues and sovereignty by creating doubts on government’s nationwide anti-corruption drive and deliberately dragged Chinese state companies on “encourage(ing) corruption” to give hype to its motivated China-crusade.

Concluding the fifth CPEC media forum, organized jointly by Chinese embassy in Islamabad and Pakistan-China Institute, both sides blasted Wells’ remarks urging Islamabad to “ask Beijing tough questions on debt, accountability, fairness and transparency” and unanimously found that there was no corruption.

Pakistan is a sovereign country and Wells’ comments grossly violated international diplomatic standards and intervened in Pakistani domestic and foreign affairs by seeking Islamabad to question Beijing and politicking the project of economic and strategic significance.

China came to salvage Pakistan’s economy and defense after Washington had suspended its economic and military aid despite suffering from $150 billion of economic losses and 70,000 casualties due to US war on terror in Afghanistan.

On top of that, China and Pakistan maintain historical friendly relations and all efforts to spark differences between the two countries have repeatedly failed. So, the US must refrain setting Pakistan’s foreign policy objectives and cede trumpeting doubts about fate-changer CPEC project that is lone hope for the peace and prosperity of more than 200 million of Pakistanis.