Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif yesterday inaugurated a trade route linking southwestern Gwadar port to the Chinese city of Kashgar as part of a joint multi-billion-dollar project to jumpstart economic growth in the South Asian country.
The Cosco Wellington, a ship berthed at the deep-sea port in Balochistan province, was loaded with over 150 containers — the first consignment under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor announced in 2014, which aims to link the Asian superpower’s Xinjiang region with the Arabian Sea.
The $46bn project is an extension of China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative and encompasses a series of infrastructure, power and transport upgrades that Islamabad hopes will kickstart its long-underperforming economy.
“The participants of the pilot convoy who have made it to Gwadar are the harbingers of development and progress, that this region is to see soon,” Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told audience members at a ceremony that was also attended by powerful army chief Raheel Sharif and senior Chinese officials.
“Their faces gleam with the beam of prosperity that CPEC will bring about in the years to come,” he said, calling the first shipment a “watershed event”.
“We will leave no stone unturned in ensuring the CPEC and all the projects under its umbrella are materialised within the given time,” the Prime Minister said, Dawn reported.
“This idea was conceived only two years ago, and this day marks the breaking of the dawn of a new era.”
“CPEC is for entire Pakistan and no region or province will be left out of it,” Sharif said, in an apparent attempt at putting to rest the reservations of smaller provinces that claim the project does not benefit them.
“The newly-constructed roads in Balochistan have opened up new areas that were inaccessible and deprived of development... and have brought peace to a volatile region,” he said.
“The government of Balochistan and the army have been successful in making the local population a stakeholder in development... Development can never be sustainable if it creates islands of properity. It must reach the lives of those who have remained mired in a trap of poverty and backwardness,” he said.
CPEC will help integrate South Asia, China and Central Asia and offer opportunities for people in this region, and investors all over the world, Sharif said.
Pakistan recorded a 4.7% growth in gross domestic product (GDP) for the fiscal year that ended in June 2016, and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has set an ambitious target of 5.7% for the current year.
With its dusty moonscape and shining new port, officials have repeatedly suggested the city of Gwadar is another Dubai in the making.
But the mineral-rich province in which it is located is beset by violence from Islamist groups as well as insurgents seeking a greater share of the region’s natural resources and secession from Pakistan.
Security problems have mired CPEC in the past with numerous attacks by separatists, but China has said it is confident the Pakistani military is in control.