Pakistan risks Chinese anger by courting Saudi Arabia, wth CPEC.
With CPEC, Pakistan risks Chinese anger by courting Saudi Arabia BY gowidenews 6 Oct 2018 Report reaching us says, The Khan administration is making political hay with the China Pakistan Economic Corridor – including efforts to reduce potential IMF loans and avoid becoming the focus of a confrontation between the US and China. Since 2015, Beijing has insisted that the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the showcase project of President Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative”, is purely an economic programme – as its name suggests. Apparently, the new Pakistani administration of Prime Minister Imran Khan did not receive the memo. In the space of a couple of weeks, it has taken two decisions which have cast the CPEC as a bargaining chip in Pakistan’s complicated, ill-managed relationships with other key partners. First, it has suddenly reduced the potential value of the CPEC programme to US$50 billion by 2030, down from US$62 billion. In one fell swoop, it decided to st...