China : China's Port of Call

China's Port of Call

China's control of Gwadar through the China Overseas Port Holding Company is the latest move towards its ambitious plan to safeguard its Persian Gulf route, through which over 60 per cent of its oil supplies flow. China also gets a potential naval base in the Arabian Sea, linked by road to its eastern Xinjiang province.

Last year, when Pakistan's Ambassador to China Masood Khan talked of a proposal to lease the port, none of the visiting Pakistani journalists in Beijing believed him. Pakistan's third port was indeed completed after China financed 83 per cent of its $248 million (Rs.14 billion) cost in 2007 but was operated by PSA on a 40-year lease. PSA backed out earlier this year after a dispute over the non-allotment of land by Pakistan's government. China stepped in as part of an ambitious plan to open up an energy and trade corridor from the Gulf to its poorer western regions.

So vital is the port to Chinese interests that the prospects of a simmering insurgency in Balochistan-over 3,000 people have been killed in violence since 2004-have not deterred it. The Pakistan army has also reportedly assured China that it would protect its personnel working on the project.

Pakistani officials say both countries plan to establish a huge naval base in the port that is 460 km west of its sole naval base, Karachi. This request was first made by former defence minister Chaudhary Ahmed Mukhtar during prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani's 2011 Beijing visit. Pakistan has now reportedly told China that it wants China's navy to maintain a regular presence in the Arabian Sea. Pakistan's military could use Gwadar as an alternative to Karachi to prevent another blockade of its maritime options by the Indian Navy, as in the 1971 war.

Pakistani defence ministry officials say the move to hand the port to China is a response to India's growing economy and regional heft. "Majority of China's port facilities in the Indian Ocean are dual use and there is the possibility that China can rapidly turn them for military use in future,” says Asim Qadeer Rana, an Islamabad-based foreign policy expert. Rana believes India's interest in Iran's Chahbahar port is a response to China's presence in Gwadar. "We believe that this will give strategic depth to Pakistan's maritime assets, commercially and militarily,” a senior official in Pakistan's Ministry of Defence told india today.

India sees this as part of a strategy to surround it with a "string of pearls” -with China having already established bases in Hambantota in Sri Lanka and Chittagong in Bangladesh. On February 6, India's Defence Minister A.K. Antony told the media that Chinese control of the port was "a matter of concern”. Indian defence brass are more than just concerned. China's presence in Gwadar poses a strategic dilemma of a kind not faced previously. "It could seriously complicate our response. In the time of war, we could risk dragging China into the picture,” a senior Indian defence official says. But what is more worrying is Pakistan and China's rapid expansion of the Karakoram highway, which links Gwadar to Kashgar.

Chinese construction firms have almost completed a 335-km tarred road from Sost, a Pakistani frontier town on its border with China, to Gilgit, the capital of the Gilgit-Baltistan province. Expansion work is in progress on the rest of the 900-km road, to link the port to Pakistan's north-south Indus Highway, which will facilitate overland transport from Gwadar to China. It takes a merchant vessel over 20 days to cover the 10,000 km distance from the mouth of the Persian Gulf to Shanghai via the narrow Malacca straits. Gwadar will enable Chinese merchant ships to load cargo at Gwadar and sail to Europe via the Red Sea, saving 3,900 km.

China's prosperous eastern seaboard is some 3,000 km away from its remote western Xinjiang province. Gwadar, in comparison, is only 1,500 km away. "With the new highway, Chinese exporters would save time and money, and Pakistani businessmen could benefit,” says Mohammad Tariq, a senior Pakistani foreign affairs ministry official. Another official said the two countries are also planning a high speed railway track from Xinjiang to Gwadar, though this is still in the future.

Sources say China's long-term plans also include road and rail links through Afghanistan to the land-locked Central Asian states. "When this network is fully operational from Gwadar to Khunjerab (on the Gilgit-Baltistan border between Pakistan and China), Urumqi (capital of Xinjiang province), Beijing and Shanghai, it will give China alternative routes for its trade with West Asia and Europe, that will be much shorter than the one passing through Malacca,” he said.

China is a key weapons supplier to Pakistan, having provided the bulk of its battle tanks, fighter jets and warships. It has agreed to deliver six submarines to Pakistan's navy and sell light fighter aircraft for $3 billion (Rs.164 billion). At $12 billion (Rs.657 billion), trade between the two countries peaked in 2012. The transfer of the new port is likely to be the sheet anchor of that relationship.

Resource from: 

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/china-pakistan-persian-gulf-arabian-sea/1/257027.html