China is a South Asian country, sharing borders with 14 countries including India. Its significance lies in its rise in the region and hegemonic influence over smaller countries through loans and the Belt and Road Initiative. China and India have fought a major war in the 60s and have disputes over the Aksai Chin and LAC, and tensions over the Indo-Pacific.
It’s so interesting to see how today’s so called journalists can claim anything under an op-ed without any repercussions! Sentences like ‘and, again, everyone knows why. China wouldn’t like it’ and ‘The Wall Street Journal has discovered that some Chinese-funded thermal power plants, for example, are supposed to pay 34 per cent a year. For 30 years. In dollars. Guaranteed.’, are thrown in there without any corroboration! And only because a newly elected leader is trying to limit his nation’s debt. Why not accept the simple explanation on face value? Why is it that anyone with any kind of Indian roots has to write negatively about Pakistan’s situation?
The only business enterprise in the region that could service foreign debt at 34% per annum, for thirty years, payable in dollars, is the cultivation of opium in Afghanistan. Not coal fired thermal power in Pakistan, any more than gas based thermal power in Maharashtra, as Enron discovered 20 years ago. Government guarantees, including one approved by Vajpayeeji’s thirteen day government in 1996, could not save the day. 2. If the economics of CPEC are not sound, both China and Pakistan will get hurt.