Islamabad and Beijing hold crucial investment meeting, safety of Chinese workers tops agenda
KARACHI: Pakistan and China will hold the 13th virtual meeting of the Joint Cooperation Committee (JCC) on China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) today, Friday, with safety of Chinese organisations and personnel working in the South Asian country expected to top the agenda.
China is Pakistan’s main ally and investor, but separatists and other militants have attacked Chinese projects and killed Chinese personnel in recent years, including five Chinese workers killed in a suicide bomb attack on March 26 while en route to the Das hydroelectric project in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The hydropower project falls within the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the flagship project of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, through which China has pledged to spend more than $65 billion on roads, rail and other infrastructure in the South Asian country of 241 million people.
China has also been an active provider of financial support for many years to bail out its struggling neighbors, and last July it approved a two-year deferral of a $2.4 billion loan to debt-stricken Pakistan, giving the country some much-needed breathing room as it grapples with a balance of payments crisis.
“The 13th Joint Cooperation Committee (JCC) meeting of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) formally began with a minute’s silence in memory of the Chinese officials who lost their lives in the recent suicide bombing,” Pakistan’s Ministry of Planning said in a statement.
“Chinese workers in Pakistan are Pakistan’s heroes and their contributions have made a great contribution to the realization of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor initiative,” he said.
The JCC is the main decision-making body for CPEC and meets annually. The memorandum of understanding to launch CPEC was signed between Pakistan and China on July 5, 2013. Pakistan says it has since completed over 50 projects under the CPEC umbrella, worth a total of $25 billion.
But Chinese projects and interests have also come under increasing attack in recent years. March’s Dasu attack was the third major attack on Chinese interests in just over a week, following a March 20 attack on a strategic port in the southwestern province of Balochistan, where China is pouring billions of dollars into infrastructure projects, and a March 25 attack on a naval air base, also in the southwest.
Both attacks were claimed by the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), the most powerful of several separatist groups in Balochistan.
The city of Dazhen, home to a large dam, has been attacked before, including a bus explosion in 2021 that killed 13 people, nine of them Chinese, though no group has claimed responsibility for the attack as in the March 26 bombing.
Pakistan is facing two insurgencies: a religiously motivated extremist insurgency and an insurgency by ethnic separatists seeking independence in the southwestern province of Balochistan, which they blame for what they say is an unfair distribution of natural resources by the government.
Chinese interests have come under attack primarily by ethnic militants seeking to drive Beijing out of mineral-rich Balochistan, which is far from the site of the March 26 bombing.
Pakistan’s top economic body on Thursday approved $2.5 million in compensation for the families of Chinese workers killed in the March 26 Dasu attack.
