Pakistan happy to aid in China's quest for land route to the west; India, not so much

"We want to open to the west and use your country to help us develop a corridor for trade and tourism," Zhu Rongji said, pointing to the giant map of China on the wall behind his desk.

It was 1993, and Shahid Javed Burki, then director of the World Bank's China operations and later Pakistan's caretaker finance minister, was calling on the then vice-premier in Beijing.

China, Zhu told him, was different from other big countries in that it had sea access only on one side. That was where Pakistan came in.

China's "all-weather friend" is an integral part of its "look west" policy to find economic sustenance for landlocked western provinces. This is why China in 1986 started working on a 600-kilometre highway across the Karakoram mountain range connecting Kashgar in Xinjiang province with Pakistan's northeast.

Nearly three decades on, Burki is on a mission to expand the highway into an ambitious 2,000km China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. It will connect the deepwater Pakistani port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea with Xinjiang, providing China easy access to fuel imports from the Middle East and Africa while creating a cheap overland export route to a maritime exit port for interior provinces such as Gansu and Qinghai.

"The idea is to develop the Karakoram Highway into a motorway network all the way to Gwadar, establish a railway line and two pipelines for oil and gas, and create industrial hubs along the way," Burki said.