OpinionCan China's largesse win it sufficient regional influence?

In the past two weeks, President Xi Jinping has made two high-profile visits to Asian neighbours. They exemplify China's push for regional influence but, equally, are reminders of the obstacles in the path of securing itself as master of the Asian stage.

The first was to Pakistan, where Xi unveiled China's biggest aid and investment package for a single country. For sure, there was plenty of logic in this. It confirmed China remains loyal to a country to which it has been in informal close alliance ever since the India-China conflict of 1962 and which served as an intermediary between Washington and Beijing ahead of president Richard Nixon's visit to China.

The road and rail investments should boost a weak Pakistan economy and improve links between Xinjiang and the Indian Ocean, where China has built a port at Gwadar in Pakistan. But this is a long and twisty route at the best of times and runs close to Indian Kashmir. China may hope that this diverts Indian attention back towards Pakistan and away from its eastern coast where Indian power in the Andaman sea could more easily choke China's trade. Beijing also hopes that massive aid gives it leverage to persuade Pakistan to crack down on links between its own Islamists and those in Xinjiang.

But Xi's focus on Pakistan is also an awkward reminder that it and North Korea are its closest Asian friends. That is not the best advertisement. Both are also nuclear armed, a status achieved with some Chinese assistance - which Beijing may now regret. These two are hardly cornerstones of the pan-Asian influence to which it aspires. Pariah North Korea surely irritates China but remains supported by it nonetheless. Pakistan is large and strategically positioned but is genetically unstable and limited in its ability to persuade Islamic militants to draw distinctions between their brothers in Kashmir and Afghanistan on the one hand and Uygurs on the other. Nor has the US quite abandoned its once close relations with Islamabad.

Grand diplomatic offensives have a way of running out of steam. I recall seeing Zhou Enlai when he arrived at Khartoum on one leg of his famous multi-nation Africa tour in 1964, a journey which led to various aid and friendship initiatives headed by China's construction of the Tanzania-Zambia railway. A diplomatic coup at the time, it left little lasting mark on either the politics or economy of the region. One reason was, of course, that China turned inward, meanwhile lending at least moral support to leftist insurgencies in countries which thought they had already had their anti-colonial revolutions. Another was that the end of colonialism and white rule changed regional dynamics so that China was no longer necessarily on the right side of history.

Zhou's Africa tour links to an even earlier event whose commemoration was the reason for Xi's visit to Indonesia - the April 1955 Bandung Conference which was attended by Zhou, but also by Japan, a landmark in its return to Asian diplomacy as it preceded its 1956 membership of the UN. The gathering of independent Asian and African states, plus Yugoslavia was intended to provide some counterweight to a world dominated by the US and Soviet Union. The conference had been initiated by the so-called Colombo Powers, India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma and Indonesia. Both Vietnams were admitted but neither Koreas. China did not have a major role, though Zhou's charm and soft words certainly helped its image. Stars of the show included Egypt's president Gamal Nasser, Indonesia's president Sukarno and India's prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Bandung was the forerunner of the Non-Aligned Movement, though it included such US allies as the Philippines, Thailand, and - yes - Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, all joined together in the Central Treaty Organisation against the Soviets.