BEIJING: A number of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects are making renewed progress as CPEC, the flagship project of China’s proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), enters its next phase to help the country alleviate energy shortages and boost its economic growth .
“CPEC 2024 projects make new progress,” Global Times reported.
“The Karot Hydropower Project, a 720 megawatt (MW) hydropower project developed on the Jhelum River in Pakistan and the first-ever major hydropower project under the BRI, will generate a total of 3.1 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2023,” Three Gorges Corporation, which invested and is leading the construction of the project, announced on its website.
In December, two projects donated by China, including a seawater desalination plant and the upgrade of the Pak-China Friendship Hospital, were inaugurated in the Gwadar district of southwestern Balochistan province.
The desalination plant will provide 5,000 tons of drinking water per day to help address the severe drinking water shortage, while the Pak-China Friendship Hospital has increased its capacity to 150 beds from the original 50.
“At the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant, units K2 and K3, both of which use Hualong One, China’s third-generation nuclear reactor with full intellectual property rights, churn out a combined 20 billion kilowatt-hours each year, satisfying both production and domestic electricity. employing two million people while saving energy equivalent to 6.24 million tons of standard coal,” the Global Times reported from the China National Nuclear Corporation.
In July last year, Unit 5 (C-5) of the Chashma Nuclear Power Plant, the 7th nuclear reactor exported from China to Pakistan, broke ground.
“Pakistan is on the right side of history by standing with a game-changing China. The second phase of CPEC will usher in record development and economic growth in the country,” said Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed, Chairman, Senate Standing Committee on Defence.
Launched in 2013, CPEC is a corridor linking Gwadar port to Kashi in China’s northwest Xinjiang region, which emphasizes energy, transport and industrial cooperation.
In its first phase, CPEC added more than 8,000 MW of power generation capacity to Pakistan’s national grid.
More than 800 kilometers of highways have been built and more than 800 kilometers of fiber optic cables have been laid. More than 200,000 jobs have been created, according to the Pakistan Embassy in China.
In order to jointly support the development of CPEC, China and Pakistan held the fourth meeting of the CPEC Joint Working Group on International Cooperation and Coordination in Islamabad in late January.
“The next phase of CPEC will be advanced in many ways, with progress in connectivity, industrialization and agriculture,” said Pakistan’s ambassador to China Khalil Hashmi in a recent interview with the Global Times.
“Projects including the optimization of the ML-1 (Mainline-1) railway project and the realignment of the Karakoram Highway (KKH) are expected to see concrete progress,” the envoy said.
Hashmi, who was present at the joint working group meeting, revealed, “Both sides have expressed satisfaction with the pace of progress being made on CPEC as a whole and Pakistan and China welcome the participation of third parties in line with CPEC’s spirit of economic cooperation, shared prosperity and shared profits.”
“Both sides have agreed to extend CPEC to third parties,” the ambassador said.
“The special economic zone can be a platform through which third-party investment could come,” the envoy said.
“More efforts will be made to ensure the safety and security of Chinese personnel and projects,” he noted.
Chinese observers said: “As a testament to the strong relationship between the two countries, CPEC has developed over the past decade as a key link and lifeline of the BRI, benefiting bilateral economic and trade cooperation as well as economic cooperation in the South Asian region.”
“The economic corridor’s role in alleviating poverty, improving people’s livelihoods and empowering local people is significant,” Song Wei, a professor at the School of International Relations and Diplomacy at Peking University of Foreign Studies, told the Global Times.
“Going forward, CPEC as the flagship of the BRI will see more connectivity and infrastructure projects being built to support the function of the economic corridor as a key tool for economic cooperation and energy security as the BRI enters a high-quality development phase in a new era. Song said.
Rejecting the so-called “debt trap” narratives used by some Western media to frame the CPEC projects, the ambassador said, “Such allegations are nothing more than ‘propaganda or political opinion and what people have not heard are facts.’
“People who indulge in such theories will have to see things from the perspective of developing countries,” the envoy noted.
The ambassador noted that the traditional channels for securing financing for large infrastructure and energy enterprises in developing countries were through organizations such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, but the funds available through these organizations have decreased over time.
“The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are an excellent vision, yet there is no funding available or indeed the [required] level of funding,” Hashmi said.
“So I think instead of criticizing China, China should actually be praised for making this financing available to so many countries in the developing world.”
