This is the first article in the four-part (In)Visible China: Understanding Chinese Global Orders series, co-hosted by LSE IDEAS’ China Foresight and the International Orders Research Unit.
China’s influence over global governance and security, as well as its exercise of soft power, all reference geopolitics on a planetary level. But what happens when we scale down the conversation about global orders to the places where Chinese power is deployed? How visible—or not—is Chinese authority in such places?
Pakistan’s experience is illustrative. It is also highly relevant; Pakistan has offered wide-ranging cooperation to China. From alignment in multilateral bodies, to defence and security cooperation, to the building of large infrastructure, to cooperation in agriculture and the educational sector, there are few sectors of bilateral cooperation that the two countries have not tapped into. Unsurprisingly, in Pakistan, the discourse around China has a strong visibility. The visibility is curated, particularly for Pakistani audiences; curated because Pakistani audiences are prompted to think about affinity and benefit when they think about China. Concurrently, the construction of new infrastructure results in the hypervisibility of China, as William A. Callahan argues in the following post in this series.
Paradoxically, Chinese authority is—and Chinese people are—frequently invisible in Pakistan. The invisibility is due to normativity. Unlike Southeast Asia, parts of Latin America, to say nothing of the Global North, in the past there was not a demographically significant Chinese diaspora in the region that is today Pakistan. There has never been a Chinatown in any Pakistani city either, a fact that visitors to Pakistan find surprising, but a Pakistani would accept with a shrug.
The interplay between visibility and invisibility—what we might think of as (in)visibility—is illustrative of how Chinese global orders appear from Pakistan.
Let me describe these in turn.
Affinity in bilateral relations is a core component of official communication. In his speech to the Pakistani parliament in 2015, Xi Jinping described that visiting Pakistan was like “coming to the home of dear brothers” before announcing that the two countries would “always move ahead together rain or shine.”
The Chinese state also highlights cooperation between China and Global South countries, amongst them Pakistan, as a realization of “common development and prosperity.” Similar messages are rendered visible through the media where reportage—which are, in fact, press releases—describe benefits from Chinese investments. For example, the residents of Gwadar, a coastal town in Balochistan, where China manages a port and is building a special economic zone, will now have access to clinics and schools, we have been told.
Pakistan’s rulers have welcomed this messaging; for them, alignment with China is a form of hedging against the United States, and Washington’s perennial demand for political and economic reform. Chinese investments also shore up political legitimacy in Pakistan for the political elite: through building spectacular infrastructure, the channeling of development funds to their constituencies, and the extraction of rent. Consequently, Pakistan’s elite oversold benefits that would be accrued from the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), one of the six economic corridors under China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In the lead-up to the Covid-19 pandemic, there was hardly a day that went by when newspapers did not run stories about how CPEC was a “game changer” for Pakistan.
Affinity towards China also appears in popular media. A video advertisement for Shan biryani masala depicts a lonely Chinese housewife, recently arrived in Lahore, learning how to cook biryani, donning a dupatta, and surprising her Pakistani neighbours with a steaming bowl of the curried rice, as she mutters an awkward as-salam alaykum. Her biryani passing the taste test at the door, the Chinese housewife is ushered indoors where scores of women gleefully assemble around her. Finally, the matriarch of the Pakistani household appears, who kisses the hand of the Chinese visitor. As tears stream down the face of the overwhelmed Chinese woman, the matriarch extols: “Keep coming over.” Echoing Xi’s familial metaphor, she tells the young Chinese woman that “this too is your home.”
The likelihood that a young female Chinese expat will ring the doorbell of their Pakistani neighbours’ house unannounced is about zero. In megacities Karachi and Lahore, Chinese expats maintain a low visibility. On the rare occasion that Chinese and Pakistanis socialize publicly, it is men only, the stiff social encounters suggesting that these are obligatory gatherings. People-to-people, Chinese and Pakistanis share little cultural vocabulary. In Pakistani public spaces, the Chinese are largely invisible.
The invisibility of China’s authority is a result of the fact that Pakistanis frequently consider Chinese built or financed roads, mass transit infrastructure, ports and power-plants as Pakistan’s own national projects. Notwithstanding Chinese expertise and investment—which is often deployed in conjunction with local investment—the need to upgrade infrastructure has been felt for decades. For the public, it is the state that is seen to have finally woken up to its governance responsibilities. China’s authority is overshadowed.
Figure 2: Road closure on the Karakoram Highway Source: Hasan H. Karrar, 2024.
There is a yet larger frame. Chinese financed or built projects are often located in marginal spaces: low-income urban neighbourhoods, disputed territory, militarized peripheries. In Pakistan, to build is to frequently enter into a contestation, which can range from demolishing low-income housing to build a mass transit line, such as the Lahore Orange Line Metro Train System, or acquiring communal land for a special economic zone, such as at Moqpandas in north Pakistan. Thus frequently, projects built or financed by China, Chinese SOEs or Chinese banks become embedded within local contestations defined by regionalism, unequal development, ethnic polarisation, and securitisation of everyday life.
In such places, Chinese people remain physically distant from local communities (There have been periodic attacks against the Chinese over the last two decades). I have seen segregation in Gilgit-Baltistan, where driving along the Karakoram Highway, Chinese dormitories are visible through chain link fences. Vegetable gardens and basketball courts are likewise visible. But they are behind a fence, under a watchful eye of security personnel. When the Chinese venture into the local market, it is with an armed escort. Traveling down the Karakoram Highway in 2022, my family and I were held up for two hours one evening because a shift of Chinese workers at a distant construction site was changing. All traffic up and down the highway was stopped. Here, China was simultaneously present and not present.
My purpose has been to describe the dual nature of Chinese global orders as they appear from Pakistan (and likely other regions of the Global South). China’s visibility is curated by state actors, the media, and Islamabad think tanks. But the lack of a common cultural vocabulary—consider, for example, that very few people in Pakistan are familiar with Chinese films or television dramas—also renders China invisible, as does how Chinese presence become subsumed in place-specific contests for autonomy and rights such as Balochistan in the west, or Gilgit-Baltistan in the north.
As a burgeoning field of scholarly inquiry, “Global China” compels us to think in terms of scale: how many countries have signed onto BRI, the size of China’s outbound investments or outward migration, how much cement China produces, and so on. We are constantly being assailed by numbers. But can we understand contemporary Chinese global orders without pivoting around the numerical? Here, the experience of Pakistan reminds us that places of encounter between China and host countries have long histories: of community and solidarity; of the pursuit of livelihood; of political struggle. Such are the contested national and regional environments in which Chinese enters, which result in the visibility and invisibility of China and Chinese authority in host countries. As much as geopolitics and planetary perspectives, the on-the-ground, day-to-day, proximate relationalities in particular locales add to our understanding of Chinese global orders.
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This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the China Foresight Forum, LSE IDEAS, nor The London School of Economics and Political Science.
The main image, Road closure on the Karakoram Highway, was taken by the author of this article himself in October 2024.
