What will Pakistan’s new leader Imran Khan deliver for China?

The election of the former cricketer as prime minister of Pakistan leaves plans for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor on a sticky wicket

Reading Time:4 minutes

Imran Khan during his cricketing days at the Hong Kong Cricket Club. File photo

Published: 8:30am, 28 Jul 2018Updated: 12:20pm, 28 Jul 2018

The umpire was on his side and the field had been set in his favour – there was little that stood between Imran Khan and power. And China took no chances. Even as Khan was taking his run-up to this week’s much discredited election, Beijing took its guard, preparing against any nasty inswingers the former pace bowler might spring on Pakistan’s staunchest ally.

The prospects for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the flagship of President Xi Jinping’s B elt and Road Initiative, “has triggered widespread speculation amid the West’s repeated hype of China’s ‘debt traps’,” said China’s state-run Global Times. “Beyond doubt, Beijing expects a higher degree of engagement by the new Pakistani government in the CPEC,” wrote Liu Lulu, described as a Chinese “expert” in retweets posted on election day by Lijian Zhao, the deputy chief of mission at the Chinese embassy in Islamabad.

Beijing has long been suspicious of Khan. His party, known as the PTI after its Urdu-language acronym, staged a five-month sit-in in the government district of Islamabad in 2014, forcing a one-year postponement to the scheduled visit of President Xi Jinping at which he was to unveil the CPEC master plan to connect Xinjiang to the Arabian Sea.

In Pakistan’s currency crisis, China is the problem and the solution

Chinese diplomats have lobbied the PTI intensely since, but with limited success. The master plan for CPEC was expanded in 2015 in response to complaints that it ignored northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, administered by a coalition led by Khan’s party. By then, however, PTI activists had joined prominent Pakistanis questioning whether CPEC was a modern-day equivalent of the East India Company, which ruled the Indian subcontinent in the 19th century.

T-shirts with images of Imran Khan at a market in Islamabad, Pakistan. Photo: Reuters

The PTI subsequently toned down its rhetoric, but indirectly attacked CPEC by persistently criticising Chinese-funded mass transit projects in three cities of the populous eastern Punjab province, governed by chief minister Shahbaz Sharif, brother of the recently ousted prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. The PTI characterised the projects as a waste of money that should have been spent on education and health care, and insinuated that corruption was rife in the CPEC projects.

Imran Khan supporters in Lahore, Pakistan. Photo: AFP

PTI politicians also seized on a fake news story about corruption in a CPEC-funded bus project in the central city of Multan last year, drawing an angry public riposte from China. Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, a close ally of Khan, has declared he intends to investigate a CPEC power generation project for evidence of corruption by Shahbaz Sharif.

Select Voice

Choose your listening speed

Get through articles 2x faster

1.25x

250 WPM

Slow

Average

Fast

00:0000:00

1.25x