[This event was organised by MEI’s Arabia Asia Research Cluster as part of their monthly internal seminar series.] 

This event was open to the NUS community only but members of the public could email a request to meievent@nus.edu.sg if they were interested in attending.

Abstract

In 2013, Pakistan handed over the operation of Gwadar Port to a Chinese port operator and, two years later, the leaders of the two countries formally signed a set of MoUs outlining the contours of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a joint economic initiative involving Chinese investment of USD 62 Billion in Pakistan over the next 15 years. Hailed as a ‘game-changer’ by the Pakistani media and the government, and a menacing threat by Pakistan and Beijing’s rivals, CPEC represented infrastructure’s promise to transform geography, of re-building the nation and the region/world, to its (proponents and detractors). However, merely three years down the road, it appears that both sides are re-thinking their original assumptions and toning down their expectations from this large-scale investment. Moreover, Pakistan is not the only country that is taking a hard look at the terms of its economic cooperation with Beijing under CPEC, a venture which forms part of China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative.

In this talk, I try to make sense of the changing expectations from CPEC by the officials and publics in the two countries based on observations from the field. I argue that in the process of negotiating and implementing infrastructure projects under CPEC, officials from both sides learned the limits of economic cooperation and their (in)ability to change the terms of this cooperation. I frame this learning in terms of the tension between different sovereignties of Chinese capital.