The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics (13 page)

For all the bilateral problems that exist between Beijing and New Delhi, many senior Indian officials continue to point to China’s backing to Pakistan as their greatest source of concern.
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Through its “all-weather” support, Beijing is perceived to play an enabling role for many of the most egregious elements of Pakistani behaviour. Beijing has undoubtedly been pressing Pakistan to stabilize its relationship with India and has encouraged it to improve trade ties with that goal in mind. The limits of China’s backing for Pakistan are also clear. But so are the fundamentals of its encouragement for Pakistan’s role in “containing” India. Even ostensibly consistent elements in Sino-Pakistan military-to-military relations have a heightened strategic importance for India nowadays. In the 1970s and 1980s, China’s weapons supplies to Pakistan were significant largely because of Pakistan’s lack of alternatives but, as Deng Xiaoping himself noted, they were “rather poor in quality”.
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While Chinese technology still lags behind some of the most advanced Western militaries in certain important respects, the gap has closed, and Pakistan benefits from some of the most up-to-date PLA equipment. Just as India was caught off guard when Pakistan tested the Ghauri missile in 1998, temporarily giving it greater reach than anything in India’s own arsenal, New Delhi now needs to be constantly attuned not only to developments in Pakistan’s indigenous capabilities, but also to ways in which it might benefit from developments in China’s own military advances, from nuclear submarines to UAVs.
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As the Chashma deal demonstrated, recent years have also seen a renewed impetus to press ahead with sensitive projects that in the time
of Jiang Zemin, or in the early years of Hu Jintao, might have prompted pause on Beijing’s part. Now, from dam building in Kashmir to assuming operational control of Gwadar port, China is willing to act despite the reaction it will elicit in India. And while Sino-Pakistani military cooperation naturally provides the focal point for India’s concerns, many of the supposedly economic projects are also seen through a strategic lens. In some cases, such as the claims about an influx of PLA troops to work on infrastructure-building in Gilgit-Baltistan, these anxieties are wildly overblown.
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In others, as the fifth chapter of this book explains, the strategic nature of the supposedly economic initiatives is not only beyond doubt, it is almost the only reason they are going ahead.

In recent years, the slowdown in Indian economic growth and complications in US-India relations have undoubtedly eased Chinese concerns about India’s take-off as a credible rival. The epilogue of the book details some of the Xi Jinping government’s refreshed efforts to improve relations between the two sides, which have expanded even further since Narendra Modi’s election victory. But this cannot obviate the fact that for Beijing, whatever the ebbs and flows in its bilateral ties with New Delhi, Pakistan’s utility as a balancer, potential spoiler, and standing counterpoint to India’s ambitions has never gone away.

If interactions between the United States, China, India and Pakistan were shaped entirely by geopolitical and economic considerations, the basic framework would be fairly clear: a group of countries pursuing hedged policies towards each other, using their rivals’ opponents to gain leverage, trying to maintain sufficient levels of cooperation to continue to extract economic benefits even as strategic competition persists. But an additional cross-cutting element complicates matters, ensuring that instead, leaders on all sides have to lower their sights from the world of high strategy to the world of IEDs, Kalashnikovs, and jihadi propaganda videos: the militant factor. In this respect, for all the years of Sino-Pakistani friendship, China shares many of the same concerns as the United States and India. Yet as the next chapter lays out, Beijing’s history with Pakistan and its militants is a complicated one: China was integrally involved in the thinking and practice of Pakistan’s sponsorship of extremist networks in the first place, and has derived some strategic advantages from it ever since.

China has a good understanding of almost everything in Pakistan, political, security or economic, that might affect the bilateral relationship, but there is one piece they just don’t get: Islam
.

Pakistani Sinologist, Islamabad 2011
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China is taking a risk by stoking up Uygur resentment while brushing aside Isa Alpetkin’s model of peaceful Uygur national development. An old Turkish proverb has it that ‘you can hit a Turk ten times, and he’ll do nothing. The eleventh time, he’ll kill you’
.

Hugh Pope, in
Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World
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In April 2010, the International Department of the Chinese Communist Party (IDCPC) played host to an intriguing set of guests. A delegation from Pakistan’s Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) was making a rare visit to the IDCPC’s gleaming modern headquarters off Fuxing Road in Beijing.
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The JUI is part of the Sunni fundamentalist Deobandi movement, and most of its international relationships are flavoured accordingly. It was in JUI
madrassa
s that many of the Taliban leadership received their education,
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JUI intermediaries helped facilitate the Taliban’s military and financial relationships in the Gulf,
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and JUI-linked militant groups helped provide logistical support to Osama Bin Laden while he was in Pakistan.
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When its “in-depth consultations”
with the CPC’s polished vice-minister Liu Jieyi were publicly announced, along with the news that “both sides had agreed to promote party-to-party cooperation”, it naturally raised a few eyebrows.
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Certainly the JUI-F, whose leader, Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman, headed the delegation, was a political party, but this was also a movement that acted as a barely concealed front for jihadi groups.
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And their trip to Beijing was by no means a unique occurrence.

The previous year, a group of visitors from Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), led by Amir Qazi Hussain Ahmad, had made the same journey to west Beijing, and went a step further: signing a formal memorandum of understanding with the CPC.
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The JI’s friends are a shade less colourful than those of its sometime-rival, sometime-ally the JUI, but the agreement to cooperate on “security issues” with the Chinese Communist Party was eye-catching nonetheless. On returning to Pakistan, Hussain publicly defended the MOU on the grounds that it was a means “to invite atheists towards Islam”.
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From China’s perspective, though, he was largely on-message. Officials noted with quiet satisfaction his statement that the JI “backed its stance on Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang” and his disavowal of “separatist Muslim movements”.
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Those with long memories knew that this was not the first time that Beijing had turned its attention to Pakistani religious parties. In the late 1990s, the likes of JI had been approached as part of a Chinese campaign to ensure that Uighur militant groups operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan were starved of support.
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The new spate of invitations to China could only mean one thing: Beijing had a problem, and didn’t believe its existing channels in Pakistan were doing enough to solve it.

A few weeks later, the nature of that problem was vividly illustrated. On 29 June 2010, Dubai’s State Security Court found two ethnic Uighurs guilty of a terrorist plot. 35-year-old Mayma Ytiming Shalmo and 31-year-old Wimiyar Ging Kimili were each sentenced to ten years in prison after being caught in the early stages of a plan to attack the Dragon Mart, an enormous shopping mall on the outskirts of Dubai known as the largest Chinese trading hub outside mainland China.
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It was the first recorded occasion that the group known as the “Turkistan Islamic Party” or “East Turkistan Islamic Movement” had attempted an operation outside its usual turf in China and Central Asia. The trial provided a rare insight into the workings of an organization whose continued existence people had doubted until a series of jihadi propaganda
videos announced its return in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

According to the court documents, Shalmo, the main plotter, had been recruited by the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) during a pilgrimage to Mecca in 2006.
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There he met a fellow pilgrim from China who spoke to him about “jihad against their country’s government”.
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He travelled with the recruiter from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, where he spent a year in an ETIM camp in Waziristan receiving weapons and explosives training, as well as instructions on making detonators from the group’s electronics expert.
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After being assigned to attack the Dragon Mart by ETIM’s deputy commander, Shalmo flew from Islamabad to Dubai where he conducted scouting missions at the mall. He also secured the support of his English-speaking co-conspirator, Kimili, who accompanied him on shopping expeditions to purchase the bomb-making materials. They were paid for with $10,000 worth of funds, which had been sent from Turkey through a
hawala
network. Local authorities in Dubai appear to have been alerted by a suspicious wire transfer that the men made between the UAE, China, and Saudi Arabia, and by the Chinese embassy, which had been monitoring the two men as a result of their Uighur ethnicity.
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When they were captured, police who raided Shalmo’s home in Al Ain found a large collection of chemicals acquired from chemists and paint supply stores, including potassium permanganate, concentrated sulphuric acid, nitrol, acetone, and nitric acid. Chemical experts at the trial said that the device, if detonated, would have had an 80-metre blast radius. Their goal was to “draw the world’s attention towards the Turkestani Muslims’ cause in China”.
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But they claimed they had not planned to kill anyone.
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The target was instead a symbolic one: a huge statue, standing outside the mall, of a Chinese dragon coiled around the globe.

Xinjiang is China’s only Muslim-majority province and by some way its largest, encompassing more than a sixth of Chinese territory. Its land boundaries span Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, Afghanistan, India, and the entirety of China’s 520km border with Pakistan. The region holds China’s most substantial deposits of oil, coal and natural gas, as well as sensitive military installations such as the Lop Nur nuclear weapons testing facility. Since the 1990s, it has also been the source of the principal terrorist threat facing China, though the real
scale and nature of that threat continue to be a matter of controversy. Xinjiang has long been wracked with tension between the Chinese state, the swelling ranks of Han Chinese migrants, and the native Uighur population. Aspirations towards greater autonomy or outright independence have never been far from the surface of political life in the province, and the consolidation of stable Chinese government authority has been a project under continuous challenge. One estimate suggests that central Chinese state control in Xinjiang has been effective for only 425 years over the course of two millennia,
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and the province experienced stretches of independent rule as recently as the 1930s and 1940s.
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In contrast to Tibet, the government in Beijing did not need to mount a full-scale military conquest when they incorporated it into the newly forged Chinese state between 1949 and 1950.
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As in Tibet, though, grievances over economic opportunities, population control policies, and land rights have readily escalated, taking on a more potent ethnic, nationalist and religious character. This has been reinforced by periods of outright repression of linguistic, religious and cultural rights, and the routine designation of large numbers of young Uighur men as “separatists” or “terrorists”, fair game for arrest, detention, or worse. Although these phases—such as the Cultural Revolution or the Strike Hard campaigns of the 1990s—have alternated with stretches of comparative liberality, the Uighurs’ sense of themselves as an oppressed minority whose way of life is under attack by the Chinese state is pervasive, and political resistance has been the result.
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For decades, this resistance was largely secular and pan-Turkic in inspiration,
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but by the 1990s, the impact of the religious revival across the region
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and the proliferation of transnational Islamist groups had started to give it a more explicitly Islamic character.
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Pakistan was at the heart of this shift. While the closest ethnic and cultural links and the simplest land-borders to cross for the Uighurs were in Central Asia, the Soviet presence there acted as a barrier to trade, travel, and—through its stymying of religious activity—Islamic influence, leaving China’s south-western neighbour to become the main conduit instead. Until the 1980s, cross-border movement between China and Pakistan was limited by logistical constraints and political restrictions, but in the course of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms the Uighurs were given newfound freedom to expand trade with neighbouring countries.
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Pakistan was the obvious place to turn. The Karakoram
Highway had been completed in 1979 and was gradually opened up in the years that followed. A network of relationships between Pakistani and Uighur traders existed even before the new trade route was completed: many of the Uighurs who fled to Pakistan in the 1930s and late 1940s, fearing persecution from the Chinese Communist Party, had set themselves up in Gilgit, the Pakistani city midway between Kashgar and Islamabad. A modest two-way flow of products saw Uighur traders buy wool and leather goods, clothing, and cutlery and sell tea, hides, electrical equipment, and silk to the Pakistanis.
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Even more important than the small-scale trade links, Deng’s reform and opening process extended to religion. During the 1980s, China allowed Uighurs to travel through Pakistan to perform the Hajj or to receive religious education. Many of those who were studying in Pakistani universities and
madrassa
s stayed on, and the transit points that were put in place for Uighurs on the way to Mecca, particularly in Rawalpindi, where they stopped while their Saudi visas were secured, became established centres of the Uighur community.
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The total number of Uighurs in Pakistan was never large by comparison with Central Asia, but their presence and activities would become increasingly sensitive as Chinese concerns over extremist influence there grew.