China has been crucial to getting the rail portion of the project off the ground. After more than a decade of disagreements with a Franco-Canadian consortium, the governments of Senegal and Mali signed separate agreements with China Railway Construction Corporation in 2015. Senegal’s deal comes to $1.24 billion, and will be funded by a Chinese […]
The corridor is only minimally about transit trade. The power plants, too, are little more than the “early harvest projects”, on commercial terms, designed to jump-start the economy before the real game begins. The real game of CPEC is about granting access to Chinese enterprises to Pakistan’s domestic markets, raw materials and the agrarian economy. […]
Hambantota isn’t just a place in Sri Lanka, it’s a symbol. What started out as a gargantuan project to transform an undeveloped swath of Sri Lankan jungle into the country’s number two city — an industrial and logistical epicenter in the heart of the Indian Ocean — turned into a metaphor for opaque government dealings, poor […]
China’s interest in deepening its involvement in Pakistan is nothing new. What has changed and has enabled the Chinese to intensify their focus on Pakistan, is the effective end of the West’s, and in particular the United States’, military operations in Afghanistan in 2015. Accordingly, NATO’s departure from Afghanistan has had two consequences: it has […]
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is being termed as a ‘game and fate changer’ for Pakistan. But if the past is prologue, the new projects under it may not have much of a future, and both Pakistan and China know this. Read Here – The Hindu
THE formal launch of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) during the recent visit of President Xi Jinping has understandably generated a lot of euphoria in Pakistan. With a planned portfolio of projects totalling around $45 billion, the size of the ‘investment’ in the CPEC over the next 15 years, if materialised, will equal the cumulative […]
Asia’s lack of institutions to ameliorate regional tensions is often lamented. But greater Asian unity may be arising by the backdoor, in the form of new and impressive infrastructure links. Read Here – Project Syndicate
looking beyond borders 