China Is Becoming The Big Brother In Its Friendship With Russia

PRESIDENT XI JINPING and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, have had their much-anticipated tete-a-tete on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Samarkand.

Like everyone else not in the room, this Bystander is scrambling for crumbs from the conversation. There is precious little of substance in the public reports of the meeting.

According to Xinhua, Xi told Putin that China is ready to work with Russia in extending strong support to each other on issues concerning their respective core interests. Other boilerplate text is available, although none that mentions Ukraine.

Unexpectedly Putin, before the meeting, acknowledged that China had (unspecified) questions and concerns over Ukraine but then picked up the pre-prepared script by thanking China for its ‘balanced position’ — a phrase we heard earlier in the week from the Kremlin — and saying that the US attempts to create a unipolar world would fail.

Both the Chinese and Russian readouts of the meeting mentioned Putin’s expression of support for the ‘One-China’ principle — the legerdemain Beijing and Washington devised for their relationship over Taiwan that Beijing now seems to be seeking to elevate into a universal principle.

However, Putin’s need to mention it points to how the balance of power in the Russia-China ‘no limits’ friendship is titling in Beijing’s favour. That is not to say that China is not offering Russia assistance, but it is becoming the ‘Big Brother’ and so gets first pick in setting the terms.

Those involve increasing flows of cut-price Russian energy eastward, but not so much by way of Chinese technology or investment going in the opposite direction, and certainly not any visible flows of military equipment or supplies.

If Putin had harboured any expectations of receiving an endorsement from Xi of his invasion of Ukraine — and the way the Kremlin has been rowing back from some fulsome comments about Chinese assistance suggests he did not — then meeting amid the disparate scrum of leaders attending the SCO summit gave Xi a perfect excuse not to offer one.

Meanwhile, Xi could get on with the task of deepening China’s infrastructure and energy ties to Central Asia, thus further chipping away at Russia’s historic sway in the region.

China Provides Afghan Aid Modestly And Cautiously

CHINA’S OFFER OF 200 million yuan ($31 million) worth of aid to the new Taliban government in Afghanistan is modest and cautiously given. Much of it will take the form of grain and other food supplies and vaccines and medicines.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced the assistance during a meeting of counterparts from Afghanistan’s neighbours, Pakistan, Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, thus distancing China from unilateral action.

Beijing established contact with Taliban officials even before the final US pullout from Afghanistan to ensure stability in the new emirate and prevent any spillover of militant Islamic radicalism into its restive Uighur population in Xinjiang.

Beijing’s continuing belligerent rhetoric towards the United States, critical of its 20-year presence in Afghanistan, may encourage Taliban hopes that China will provide the investment to rebuild the economy of their re-established but war-torn emirate.

However, China’s priority will be to ensure Afghanistan does not become a staging post for terrorists headed eastwards, followed by protecting Chinese businesses already operating there.

That was its strategy with its aid to the previous Kabul government. Providing anything more to its Taliban successor will be regarded with great caution in Beijing until it is clear how the situation in Afghanistan is developing.

Wang’s suggestion at the neighbours’ meeting that the United States and its allies ‘are more obligated than any other country to provide economic, livelihood and humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people, and help Afghanistan maintain stability, prevent chaos and move toward sound development’ only confirms that cautious stance.

Update: Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen has told the Global Times that there is no place in Afghanistan for the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) or any other terrorist group ‘with a foreign agenda’, to train, recruit or fundraise, and that many ETIM members had left the country, begging the question of where they have gone.

Shaheen also added to the things Beijing would like to hear by saying said that the Taliban was keen for Afghanistan to participate in the Belt and Road Initiative.

China Will Move Cautiously But Purposefully In Afghanistan

BEIJING HAS PROBABLY been as taken aback as the rest of the world by the speed with which the Taliban has resumed control of Afghanistan — and created an American-sized power vacuum in the region.

China will, however, be in no hurry to rush in to fill it, even as its leaders take private delight in what they will regard as further evidence of the global decline of the United States.

In the near term, Beijing will happily profess its philosophy of non-interference in another country’s domestic affairs. At the same time, it will buy as much peace and stability from the Taliban as it can while keeping the Wakhan Corridor tightly bottled up.

The eastern end of the Wakhan Corridor, a remote mountain valley on the ‘roof of the world’, forms China’s short (less than 100 kilometres) horseshoe-shaped border with Afghanistan. An ancient trade route spilling into Xinjiang through the Wakhjir Pass, it has long been closed at the Chinese end for fear of the drugs, Uighur separatists or other extremists that might flow through it. Tajikistan and Pakistan, to the north and south, respectively, also provide a physical buffer between Afghanistan and China.

Beijing provided modest military and economic support for the now-collapsed Kabul government for the past several years — including training some of the police who melted away in the face of the Taliban advance. Yet, it will have no compunction about pivoting to deal with the Taliban.

It has probably already used its influence in Pakistan to build connections with the new regime. It can offer security and economic assistance in return for protecting Chinese commercial interests and assurances that the Taliban will not support Uyghur militant forces or allow them to use the country as a base or transit route.

As a secondary objective, it will also seek the use of the Taliban’s influence in assuaging its growing security concerns for Chinese citizens and interests along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

The ‘March West‘ policy since the mid-2010s has led Beijing to be increasingly involved in West Asia and the Middle East, not only deepening its relationships with Iran and Pakistan but expanding engagement with other regional powers such as Saudia Arabia.

However, what should have been a serious complication for China’s regional relationships — its treatment of the Uighurs — has been notably buttoned down by Beijing. Few Middle Eastern leaders have spoken out publicly on this — a sign of the importance of the growing ties in other areas plus Beijing’s ability to use its economic clout to dampen international criticism of its domestic policies.

The March West is, however, a journey of influence and transactional relationships, not empire. Beijing knows full well that Afghanistan is a graveyard of empires.

The issue that Beijing will eventually have to face in Afghanistan is the one that has confronted other outside powers before it: it is difficult to maintain a neutral position in a part of the world where there are so many overlapping and longstanding rivalries and conflicts.

It will be even more challenging when the time comes, as it surely will, for Beijing to step up its diplomatic and security engagement beyond the purely mercantilist.

Mapping The Belt And Road

 

THR USEFUL MAP above is produced by The Mercator Institute for China Studies, the German think tank that is the largest in Europe with an exclusive focus on China.

There has been a sharp uptick in recent weeks in expressions of concern by US politicians outside the traditional China-hawks about Beijing’s long-term plans to expand its global power through infrastructure development and finance and by building up its military.

In February, The Mercator Institute published a report suggesting that Europe should have similar concerns about how Beijing is expanding its influence in Europe in support of those aims through the use of ‘sharp power’ — the offensive use of soft power tools aimed at political and economic elites, media and public opinion, and civil society and academia.

 

New Military Base In Afghanistan Will Extend China’s Sway

 

CHINA HAS A small frontier with Afghanistan, a horseshoe-shaped border of fewer than 100 kilometres around the eastern end of the Wakhan Corridor (seen above), the isolated, mountainous valley on the roof of the world wedged between Tajikistan and Pakistan that connects Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Badakhshan with the western marches of Xinjiang.

The corridor is an ancient trade route, spilling into Xinjiang through the Wakhjir Pass, but has long been closed at the Chinese end for fear of the drugs, Uighur separatists or other extremists that might flow through it.

It does, though, open up into a much larger space, the one being created by the United States’ patchwork withdrawal from international affairs, and into which Beijing is venturing, albeit tentatively.

China will be funding, supplying and likely building, a military base in Badakhshan, according to Gen. Dawlat Waziri, the Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman, quoted by Russian news sources.

The base’s location has yet to be settled. Afghan forces will garrison it (and thus it will not be a Chinese military base, as the Defence Ministry insists).

However, Xu Qiliang, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, speaking after meeting a delegation to Beijing in December headed by acting Afghan Defence Minister Tariq Shah Bahrami, said Beijing would build the base sometime in 2018 to “strengthen pragmatic cooperation in areas of military exchange and anti-terrorism and safeguard the security of the two countries and the region, making contributions to the development of China-Afghanistan strategic partnership of cooperation”.

Beijing and Kabul already have a 2015 border policing agreement that involves equipment supply, training and joint patrols. There have been reports of Chinese forces operating on the Afghan side of the border since 2016. A report by the French news agency AFP last October quoted local Kyrgyz saying Chinese soldiers had been intermittently bringing them food and warm clothing for the past year.

The Defense Ministry has confirmed counter-terrorism and anti-cross-border crime operations but has dismissed Central Asian and Indian reports of Chinese military vehicles patrolling inside Afghanistan.

The policing relationship has already expanded to the defence side with a pledge by Beijing of $70 billion in military aid to the Afghan government over three years.

The proposed new base would represent a step up on that co-operation. It would effectively be a forward base for cutting off any support coming from Afghanistan for militant factions of the Muslim Uighur population that once formed a majority in Xinjiang but is now outnumbered by Han Chinese following years of inward migration.

Islamic State’s regrouping in Afghanistan following the military defeat of its self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq is particularly concerning for Beijing because of its recruitment of ethnic Turkmen jihadis, some of whom have links with Uighur separatists who want to establish a state of East Turkestan.

China has also offered to involve Kabul in the $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Afghanistan could provide an alternative route to some or all of the CPEC, which itself has security concerns. To this end, Beijing has been mediating disputes between Pakistan and Afghanistan whose common border is tribal lands where neither government’s law runs writ.

China is already part of the Quadrilateral Coordination Group, comprising Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and the United States, whose task of bringing an end to the Afghan civil war has foundered on the combination of deteriorating relations between Islamabad and Kabul and eroding trust between Beijing and Washington. Using bilateral relationships, Beijing could exploit its relationship with Islamabad to use the influence the Pakistan military has over Afghanistan’s insurgents to rein in the Taliban, even to the point of bringing them into peace talks (although that would not help it deal with the threat of Islamic State).

The emergence of an alliance of Pakistan and China in Afghanistan, in partnership with Russia, would be challenging to the United States’s close relationship with the Kabul government and another example of Beijing building alternative security alliances to its own specifications — all further signs of the gradual expansion of China’s growing clout in the region and willingness to use it.

One Belt, One Road To Rule Them All

IT IS NOT just General Secretary Xi Jinping’s ‘Thought’ that has been inscribed in the Party’s constitution. So, too, has his grand vision and signature policy, the Belt and Road Initiative, or OBOR for its original designation, One Belt One Road.

This will give political longevity to the ambitious scheme Xi announced in 2013 to transverse the Eurasia landmass and beyond with a network of roads, railways, ports, pipelines and other infrastructure projects carrying China’s surplus industrial and services capacity westwards and food and energy resources in the opposite direction. Opposing or obstructing it, just as with opposing or obstructing Xi, will henceforth equate with betraying the Party itself.

Few, if any infrastructure projects can boast either such prestige or protection. As Xi indicated at the Party Congress just concluded, OBOR will be central to China’s development until at least 2050, the date Xi has set by which China is to be a leading global power (neatly coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949).

So great is the ambition of this combination of commerce, construction and capital that it is impossible to put an accurate cost or timetable on it.

Bloomberg counts more than $500 million the China has so far spent or committed to OBOR. There is a $40 billion Silk Road Fund and much of the $100 billion Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will be directed towards it. No doubt some of the $300 billion National Pension Fund will find its way to OBOR projects as will investment from state-owned banks and enterprises and dutifully patriotic private companies.

The US investment bank Morgan Stanley has suggested that $1.2 trillion will be spent on OBOR-related infrastructure over the next decade. However, so loosely is it defined and so ambitious its scope that you can just about put any price tag on it, as long as it is in the many trillions.

Beijing lists 68 countries as OBOR partners spanning Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Oceania. They already account for one-third of global GDP and trade, two-thirds of the population and one-quarter of global foreign direct investment. The management consultancy McKinsey & Co.reckons they will contribute 80% of global economic growth and add 3 billion to the global middle class by 2050. Any number is going to be large.

For all the trillions of dollars of hard infrastructure that will be built — and as we have noted before, if even only a fraction of what is being talked about gets completed, it will still be huge — OBOR is also a geopolitical project. Whether you see that as 21st-century merchant hegemony writ large or the world’s largest platform for regional collaboration and future engine of trade and investment growth, there can be little argument that it will potentially give Beijing vast sway over a large part of the world.

It is a part of the world with lots of risks, however, both geopolitical and financial. One measure of both is that state-owned insurer China Export & Credit Insurance Corp. said it has paid out $1.7 billion in claims since 2013 on $480 billion of exports and investments it has insured in OBOR countries. The sort of risks the insurer covers are things like government seizures, nationalisation and political violence.

More than half of China’s outward OBOR investment since 2013 has been in countries whose sovereign credit rating is below investment grade — ‘junk’ in the jargon. Of the 68 OBOR countries, only 27 of them are not rated as junk.

It is easy to assume that the Chinese state and its own and private (and dutifully patriotic) companies will be pouring a lot of good money after bad. However, many of the OBOR countries have trade and growth potential that can be released by infrastructure development, especially on the scale and interconnectedness envisaged. That would generate some of the growth necessary to provide some return on the investment.

It will also give China a huge sphere of influence far beyond its near abroad, in which today’s superpowers will be marginalised.

The ‘America First’ economic and political nationalism of the Trump administration, which has caused the stalling of the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) and disengaged the ‘Asian pivot’ of its predecessor Obama administration, has given Beijing an unexpected window of opportunity to advance OBOR and its alternative arrangements to those that have governed the international order in the era since World War II.

Even A Small Belt And Road Would Be Huge

ONE BELT, ONE ROAD is ambitious. A network of roads, railways, ports, pipelines and other infrastructure that will crisscross China and Central Asia connecting to Europe and Africa via land routes (the Belt) and shipping lanes (the maritime Road).

It already covers two-thirds of the world’s population, one-third of global GDP and about a quarter of the world’s trade in goods and service.  China, President Xi Jinping announced at this weekend’s Belt and Road forum in Beijing (seen above), proposes to throw $124 billion at developing his vision of the next great engine of global trade.

Those monies would be a downpayment on what is estimated to be $900 billion of related investment, financed by a variety of Chinese or China-backed banks, funds and investing and development institutions. One Belt, One Road will, depending on your point of view, be 21st-century merchant hegemony writ large or the world’s largest platform for regional collaboration.

Leaders from 29 countries, the heads of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, the UN, and a host of other dignitaries attended the forum this weekend, including most notably Russian President Vladimir Putin (absentees include the leaders of the United States, Japan and India). All the attendees, no doubt, will have had their private fears and hopes about the scale of this project to redraw over many decades the geoeconomic, and likely, the geopolitical map of Eurasia.

Whether China will hold the course, especially under Xi Jinping’s successors, is one question about the project. There are also legitimate concerns that some investment gets misallocated and ends up on being spent on ‘highways to nowhere’ and other projects that never should be built in the first place. Moreover, private and non-Chinese investment will be needed as well (and be a bellwether of global acceptance of the idea).

However, such is the scale of One Belt, One Road that even if only a fraction of it materialises, it will make Eurasia look a very different place.

China’s Domestic Counterterrorism May Fail Against Global Jihadis

‘RESTIVE’ IS THE adjective favoured in the popular prints to qualify Xinjiang. President Xi Jinping’s call for the far western autonomous region to be surrounded by a ‘great wall of iron’ suggests the presence of a greater threat.

As does Cheng Guoping, state commissioner for counterterrorism and security.

He says that the Uighur separatists that comprise the East Turkestan Independence Movement are the China’s ‘most prominent challenge to social stability economic development and national security’.

Xi and Cheng’s comments follow the most recent show of force in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi and other cities such as Kashgar, involving some 10,000 paramilitary police with accompanying armoured vehicles and attack helicopters.

China has been fighting a sporadic and low-level civil war with Uighur separatists for decades that on occasion erupts into deadly terrorist attacks across China. These attacks, usually involving a car bomb or knifings, have become more frequent, dispersed and indiscriminate since 2012, though the number, as far as can be determined, is small.

A May 2014 attack in Urumqi killed 43 and wounded 90. The province simmers with unrest as the now minority Muslim population bristles under what it considers to be culturally and religiously repressive government by ethnic Han Chinese.  Yet there is little on the surface to suggest that the local threat level has suddenly escalated to the degree these actions and Xi and Cheng’s comments would imply.

However, Beijing now sees external as well as internal threat. That is challenging its notions of how to deal with ‘terrorists’.

Three recent videos, purportedly made by the Islamic State group and an al-Qaeda affiliate, raise the spectre that China could import the radical Islamic extremism that it has so far avoided. Beijing has long used the bogeyman of radical connections between Xinjiang separatists outside and the Muslim Uighur minority within to exert repressive domestic control.

The 30-minute video that surfaced in February, in particular, gives some weight, at last, to those warnings. It shows Uighurs training in Iran and threatening that blood would ‘flow in rivers’ in China — although also in Russia and the United States.

There are well-documented reports of Uighurs having gone to Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq to fight for radical Islamic groups. The numbers of Chinese ones — 100-150 on the estimates we have seen — scarcely seem to justify the extraordinary reaction of authorities, although one of the Islamic State videos includes what is thought to be the first instance of Uighur-speakers declaring allegiance to Islamic State and its self-proclaimed caliphate.

One question is whether Beijing’s fears are overblown and its response proportionate; another is whether it can adapt a counterterrorism approach developed in response to domestic concerns to international terrorism.

China, unlike the United States and Russia, has little by way of a military footprint in West Asia thanks to its profession of non-interference in the affairs of other countries. It is not involved in either the US or Russian/Iranian-led actions against Islamic State in Syria or Iraq, the usual prerequisite of Islamic State acts of terror against a country.

A hostage taking and killing in 2015 is the sole known case involving targeting a Chinese citizen, although seven Chinese were among the 20 killed in a bomb attack on Bangkok’s Erawan Shrine and three Chinese citizens were among the 27 who died during an attack on the Radisson Blu Hotel in Mali’s capital, Bamako, both the same year.

However, China’s growing global footprint and expatriate labour force, and especially the expansion of ‘One Belt, One Road’ across Eurasia, makes it almost inevitable that it would eventually be unable to avoid coming into harm’s way from international jihad.

As we noted recently, China and Afghanistan share a short border through which the forces Beijing so fears could enter the country directly. China border-police controls are keeping it under close surveillance in the event that, as Islamic State loses territory in Syria and Iraq, the group falls back to being an insurgent guerrilla force and its leaders and others of global jihadist movements relocate to Central Asia and Afghanistan, far too close to China for Beijing’s liking.

However, the capacity of Islamic State to coordinate and stage large-scale attacks inside China will be limited. Furthermore, Beijing’s already-fierce repression in Xinjiang and tight censorship everywhere mitigates the caliphate’s strategy of inspiring lone wolves and affiliated terror groups through a radicalising narrative of domestic marginalisation of Muslim minorities.

This has had some success in Europe and the United States, but beyond the difficulty in having the message penetrate the Great Firewall, disaffected Muslim minorities do not exist in China in the widespread urban pockets they do in, say, France, Belgium and Germany.

Hitherto, China has dealt with the threat of domestic terrorism, which it considers one and the same as separatism and extremism, with a three-pronged strategy: enhancing regional economic growth; stronger internal security; and strict controls over ethnic and religious activities. All have been heavily applied in Xinjiang with the additional factor of ethnic Han inward migration.

Beijing’s likely response to the new external threat that it sees to its emerging core national interests will be to crack down even harder on the one place it knows there are a lot of Muslims. Already law regulates and constricts religious practices and public life in Xinjiang, such as growing beards, wearing the veil and fasting during Ramadan — all symbols, the authorities say of “Islamic extremism” (like in the US, ‘Muslim’ and ‘terrorist’ will quickly become conflated).

Since last year Xinjiang residents who have a passport are required to turn it into local police, to whom they must reapply for its return if they want to travel abroad. There were reports last year of another Muslim minority, Kazakhs living in border districts of Xinjiang, being told to give DNA samples and fingerprints when applying for travel documents. Uighurs who speak in favour of greater political freedoms risk imprisonment.

These measures are likely to be both more tightly enforced and extended, in the name of “maintaining social control” in the resource-rich western marches that give onto the key overland routes through Central Asia to the Middle East and Europe.

However, the One Belt, One Road dimension and the need to protect the growing numbers of Chinese citizens abroad is evolving Beijing’ security interests. Its responses will have to follow suit. It has been exchanging information on Islamic State with the United States, with which it also cooperates on technical matters to counter terrorism such as port security and anti-money laundering.  (Whether and how that will continue with the Trump administration remains to be seen.)

China has also been talking to Pakistan and the Afghan government about ways to promote stability in Afghanistan, and within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s Regional Anti-Terrorism initiative. More controversially, it has also pushed for groups it considers to be terrorist to be added to international and national terrorist watch lists.

Beijing slowly recognises that many of the terrorism challenges that it faces have roots beyond its borders and thus will need it to participate in international counterterrorism efforts. However, its has so far shown that it prefers bilateral attempts to apply its three-pronged strategy with economic, policing and security aid to other countries, but that at best has to be done at arm’s length or get China involved in the internal affairs of countries in ways that run counter to its non-interference doctrine.

As it tries to figure that out, its instinctive reaction will still be to over-react at home by doing more of what it knows how.

China and Afghanistan Draw Closer On The Roof Of The World

 

CHINA’S BOUNDARY WITH Afghanistan is short; less than 100 kilometres arcing around the end of the Wakhan Corridor, a high mountain valley, seen above, on the ‘roof of the world’ that once provide a narrow imperial buffer between the Russian and British empires. Today it separates Tajikistan to the north and Pakistan to the south and looks on maps like a panhandle of Afghanistan whose territory it is.

Though it is an ancient trade route, spilling into Xinjiang through the Wakhjir Pass, it has long been closed at the Chinese end for fear of the drugs, Uighur separatists or other extremists that might flow through it.

Beijing and Kabul have a 2015 border policing agreement that involves joint patrols, but of late there have been reports that Chinese forces have been operating on the Afghan side of the border.

This is a remote part of the world, so supporting accounts are scant. The Defense Ministry has confirmed that counter-terrorism and anti-cross-border crime operations have occurred but has dismissed Central Asian and Indian reports of Chinese military vehicles patrolling inside Afghanistan.

Pictures published last November show what look like Chinese-made armoured patrol vehicles inside the Wakhan Corridor. While the vehicles can be made out, what cannot is who is driving them — PLA soldiers, Chinese armed police, Chinese private security firm personnel, or someone else altogether, such as Afghanistan border police.

Relations between the two countries have been gradually growing closer since the establishment of Afghanistan’s National Unity government in 2014.

Afghanistan has agreed not to provide sanctuary for the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, the Uighur separatist group that has been fighting a long and sporadic war for Xinjiang’s independence. For its part, China is training Afghan police and supplying the force with equipment and has pledged $70 billion in military aid as the policing relationship expanded to the defence side (though this hasn’t yet extended to heavy weapons). Bilateral exchanges on both fronts are increasing.

None of this is yet any substitute for Afghanistan’s dependence on the West. However, for Beijing, always worried about insecurity on its Western marches, a close relationship with Kabul will also be essential to the success of One Belt One Road, especially if security concerns about the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor worsen.

The China-Aligned Movement

PRESIDENT XI JINPING’S will be arriving in Indonesia for the 60th Anniversary of the Bandung Conference by way of Pakistan. There could be no more apt metaphor for how China’s place in the world has changed.

At Bandung in 1955, Zhou Enlai and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru bestrode the emerging movement of African and Asian leaders summoned by Indonesia’s President Suharto to come together in ‘non-aligned’ anti-colonial solidarity — a “meeting of the rejected” as the American author Richard Wright who attended the conference described it.

Six decades on, Xi arrives having just announced $46 billion in Chinese investment in Pakistan, partly for energy but also to construct transport, energy and communications links between the western Chinese city of Kashgar and the blue-water port of Gwadar.

It is just one leg in the southern corridor of a grand Chinese scheme to create a new network of land and sea routes between East Asia and Europe. This New Silk Belt and Maritime Economic Road is such a central part of Xi’s foreign-policy initiative that the Politburo has set up a leading team to oversee its implementation .

As this Bystander has noted before,

to Beijing, Pakistan looks a lot like a corridor from the high plateau of China’s western reaches to the blue water ports of the Arabian Sea and thus access to shipping routes to the Middle East, Africa and Europe. The distance is relatively short, less than 1,500 kilometers as the crow flies, but at the northern end the terrain is difficult, the weather harsh, borders unsettled and security uncertain.

Road and rail links are patchy, particularly north of Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, and frequently disrupted. Nor is there yet a motorway connecting the capital to the southern port city of Karachi, let alone to Gwadar on the Gulf of Oman close to the border with Iran and where China is developing a deep-water port and naval base.

Xi described his trip to Pakistan, his first, as being like visiting his brother’s home. The two countries don’t seem familial allies, even if they have been discussing turning Pakistan into an energy pipeline for China since at least 2006. Not that they couch it in such terms: Xi calls it an “all-weather strategic partnership of cooperation”.

In the meantime, Beijing has been dancing delicately with its regional rival, Delhi. Xi’s bounteous trip to Pakistan, though, will make Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s visit to China next month — a reciprocal visit for Xi’s trip to India last September — an uncomfortable one. It will be telling to see whether China is more a bestower or receiver of gifts on that occasion.

Modi has been taking a more assertive line with China than his predecessor, particularly in the Indian Ocean. He has also aligned India more closely with the U.S., signing a strategic agreement with Washington during President Barack Obama’s visit earlier this year.

Beijing blatantly cosying up to Pakistan will sit ill with India. Non-aligned no more — on either side. Bandung in 1955 seems not only a very different time, but a very different world.