This is the second 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.

This string of essays considers how we should frame—and thus understand—“China.” It grows out of workshops in Johannesburg, South Africa and Lahore, Pakistan that brought together scholars, public intellectuals, and officials through the “Chinese Global Orders” project, which is funded by the British Academy’s Global Convening Programme.

One of our early conclusions is that rather than think of China’s impact on the world in terms of “Global China,” which as Hasan H. Karrar argues is quite top-down, state-centric, and generally leaves out local communities in Pakistan, we should explore how China is visible and invisible outside the PRC at different scales, i.e. through activities that are local, national, international, and even transnational.

My argument today is that rather than just focus on visible and invisible, it’s helpful to think about how China is either invisible or hypervisible, especially in the Global South. This is important because it means that China is not visible in a normal and accessible way to non-elite “people-on-the-street.”

To explain hypervisibility, we can look to inter-cultural encounters in a different place: veil-wearing Muslim women in Europe. On the one hand, wearing a veil works to make these women invisible. But, paradoxically, on the other hand, when women wear a veil on the street in London, they say that it makes them feel hypervisible (see here, p. 181).

This is surely a controversial example, especially when talking about Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan. But I think it’s useful because it underlines the contested and political nature of talking about China, visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility.

I noticed China’s invisibility in Pakistan in three spaces:

First, the invisibility of China’s key institutional role in important infrastructure projects like the Engro Thar Coal Power Project in Tharparkar district, Sindh (see Fig. 1). While the PRC is the main financer and builder of these joint-venture projects, at the workshop activists noted how people on the ground blame the Pakistani partners for the projects’ negative economic, social, and environmental impacts.

Figure 1: Engro Thar Coal Power Project. Source: CPEC Secretariat, Pakistan

Second, the relative invisibility of Chinese managers, engineers and workers in CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Cooridor) projects, like in Tharparkar and Gwadar. While Karrar (critically) describes a heart-warming video ad for a Pakistani food brand that brings together Chinese and Pakistani housewives, many participants explained how Chinese who work in Pakistan live very separate lives from their Pakistani hosts.

I asked if this was for understandable cultural reasons: Chinese people probably want to watch Chinese TV shows and eat Chinese food. But the workshop participants said it was much more than an issue of intercultural communication because there were real security issues: Chinese workers and diplomats have been attacked numerous times in Pakistan.

For China’s state-owned enterprises, the solution to this security problem is to physically separate Chinese workers by constructing “new Chinatown fortresses.” This makes sense for security. But culturally and socially, it makes Chinese even more invisible in Pakistan.

The third site of Chinese invisibility is politics. As a result of PRC diplomats and companies “going global” through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), “China” has become a significant issue in the electoral politics of many countries: e.g. Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, etc. Some political parties are pro-China and welcome BRI projects, while others are more critical of the PRC and question the value of these mega-projects.

Interestingly, although Pakistan and China are highly integrated in terms of local, national, and international political-economics, the PRC was not an issue in Pakistan’s 2024 general election. While there are many interesting explanations for this, e.g. Chinese projects are seen as part of Pakistan’s own development strategy, I still find it strange that not one political party took advantage of “China” as an issue.

Figure 2: Orange Line Metro Train System in Lahore, 2020. Source: China News Service, Wikimedia Commons

How is China hypervisual?

Hasan and Morris argue that the Orange Line Metro Train System in Lahore makes China visible. I agree, and suggest that this 27.1 km-long driver-less mass transit train line has become a symbol of automated hypermodernity that makes China not only visible, but “hypervisible” (see Fig. 2). This primarily elevated train runs across the city to join key nodes, including the Shalamar Gardens and the Main Railway Station, and thus is an audacious sign of China’s hypervisibility.

While the Orange Line is celebrated by the elite as a successful development project, at the workshop local activists criticized how this elevated train cuts through traditional neighborhoods and divides communities. The Engro Thar Coal Power Project, and the high security roads built around it (see Fig. 1), similarly serves to divide local people from their fields, their markets, and even from their cemeteries. Importantly, such projects are gendered: Women generally feel the brunt of these negative impacts.

This invisible/hypervisible dynamic means that China doesn’t have a “normal” visibility “on the ground” in everyday life for Pakistanis. Rather, China is both deep underground and way above ground, both physically and metaphorically, as seen in the Orange Line which is either elevated far above Lahore, or tunnelled below the city. Karrar’s story about being caught in a huge traffic jam that was deliberately scheduled to facilitate the secure transportation of Chinese workers home from work is another example: the Chinese on the bus were totally invisible, but their impact was hypervisible to Pakistani travellers.

In this way, even though the PRC government and Chinese businesses have a huge impact Pakistan geopolitically and geoeconomically, evidence presented here shows that “China” as an everyday experience isn’t a big issue at the “street level” for non-elite Pakistanis.

One workshop participant suggested that this is a knowledge problem, which could be solved by more detailed study of Pakistan in China, and of China in Pakistan. But as these examples show, invisibility here is not a “bug” that could easily be corrected. Rather, hyper/visible China’s absence in Pakistan’s everyday experience is a very deliberate “feature” in both Chinese actions and Pakistani understandings.

Hence the problem is less the material issue of a knowledge deficit, and more of a normative problem that shows that we need to come up with new concepts to understand China’s relations with the world.

This set of essays that re-thinks China’s global and local entanglements in terms of (in)visibility, (il)legibility, and hypervisibility is a good start.

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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 is a still from “Shan Masala Ad TVC 2017 – Chinese Couple”, aOgilvy & Mather video add available on YouTube.