This is the third 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.
Spending time in both Johannesburg and Lahore in late 2023 and early 2024 for the British Academy Project, Chinese Global Orders, I was struck by seemingly contradictory claims around Chinese development during our workshops; China is invisible and hypervisible, China is everywhere and nowhere. Upon flying into Johannesburg, Chinese presence was immediately visible, with a China-related advert the first thing I saw when leaving O.R. Tambo International Airport. In Johannesburg, China was both visible and widely discussed, with the ongoing South Africa-China relationship in the BRICS a hot topic of conversation. While travelling to Lahore I reflected on discussions I had around the “Iron Brotherhood” linking Pakistan-China. The iron discourse was so common that the term ‘Iron Brother’ became a meme amongst Chinese millennials, and friends in China with no direct relationship to Pakistan would ask each other: “Iron Brother, shall we go for hot pot tonight?” With the iron discourse in my mind, I was surprised to not see more Chinese presence in Lahore, and in the workshops hosted at Lahore University of Management Sciences it was difficult to put a finger on what role China played in Pakistan or what role Pakistan was playing for China. While the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) was brought up, China’s presence felt somewhat intangible. It was during a presentation on Lahore’s rapid transport system, the Orange Line, that a feeling emerged: China’s presence in Pakistan is less about visibility and more about legibility.
Multiple participants in our workshops discussed Lahore’s Orange Line, a project that had major financing from China’s Exim Bank while China’s CRRC Zhuzhou Locomotive provided key material infrastructure. Critiques of the project included those around its usefulness to a population that lives close to their workplaces, the harm the project did to heritage sites, the displacement caused by the project, and the way in which the project became a part of Pakistani party politics. Across the discussions around the Orange Line it was also noted that the project wasn’t necessarily understood as a product of Chinese capital or engineering expertise, and that the project didn’t necessarily influence how China was regarded.
Figure 1: Orange Line station interior. Source: King Eliot, Wikimedia Commons.
When I saw images of Orange Line stations, my mind immediately registered the station as Chinese. If you had shown me an image of the station interior I would have told you I had been there before, as the stations immediately took me back to Beijing’s Line 5 and Shenzhen’s Line 4. While I am not suggesting that Beijing and Shenzhen overground metro stations have a completely unique design philosophy, they do have a design vocabulary that made them recognisable to me, a design vocabulary that was transferred to the Orange Line. This made a Chinese infrastructure investment legibly “Chinese” to those who move between China and Pakistan.
Figure 2: Qinghu North Station, Shenzhen Metro Line 4.
Source: ChenSimon, Wikimedia Commons.
To further understand how Lahore’s most visible infrastructural project was seen, I visited Orange Line stations with a small group of Lahore based artists and designers; I hoped to see the stations through their eyes. Standing on the main platform of Sabzazar Station I immediately felt transported to Tiantongyuan South or Qinghu North, the main difference being that the Chinese-English station signage common in Chinese stations had become Punjabi-English signage. Across the publicly accessible parts of the station the only Chinese I saw was on a panel for fire safety equipment. As I stood with the group of artists and designers I asked them how they interpreted the station’s design. They told me that in their eyes the station was not Pakistani, but they would also not identify it as Chinese: It was “other” and “non-local.” In this context, the Chinese origins of a hypervisible developmental project had different logics of legibility: to me the Orange Line was very Chinese, to local actors it was vaguely international.
Throughout our workshop, based on the experiences shared by politicians, journalists, academics, and activists, I felt that China was both unseeable and unspeakable. When discussing new coal power projects in Tharparkar, one workshop participant highlighted that while Chinese companies were involved in developing coal power infrastructure (Shanghai Electric, China Machinery Engineering Corporation, Yanzhou Coal, etc.) they were rarely criticised for participating, while non-Chinese partners, such as British Oracle Power, were talked about differently. A similar point was made in relation to Balochistan, where it was argued that local political actors would make claims towards the Western world and Pakistani politicians using the language of imperialism and colonialism, but they would seldom make such claims in relation to China, perhaps the most important investors in the region. In both of these cases China fades into the background even when it is a key actor, with China rendered illegible and unspeakable.
The local political economy may be one reason for China becoming unspeakable, with fears that criticizing China and Chinese development may fracture the Iron Brotherhood. But another aspect of this unspeakability relates to the broader language of resistance: There is a centuries old vocabulary through which Western action can be criticized, with imperialism, neoliberalism, and colonialism key elements of this discourse. This is a vocabulary of resistance and critique that is always within reach. Is there an equivalent vocabulary for critiquing global China and its actions abroad? This dictionary is still being developed, the repertoire is still being developed, and until this language of resistance is more understood local actors may find it difficult to critically respond to China’s global action.
But a new language isn’t always necessary, and recent events show us that local actors are finding ways to speak about China by relying on an older vocabulary. In May 2024, prominent Balochistan activist Dr. Mahrang Baloch used her social media presence to call for protests in relation to the fencing of Gwadar city, with the China-Pakistan Economic Cooridor (CPEC) project described by the Baloch Yakjehti Committee as a “colonial project.” In a series of posts, Mahrang Baloch highlighted how it is “now widely recognised that China is akin to the East India Company, with Islamabad and Rawalpindi as stakeholders, and the Balochistan assembly as their proxy,” and that the “fencing of Gwadar city has raised concerns that CPEC intends to marginalise the local population, fostering fear and insecurity.” Chinese investments in Pakistan have been under increasing attack, and the Chinese Foreign Ministry has asked “Pakistan to take effective measures to protect the safety and security of Chinese nationals, institutions and projects in Pakistan.” In a recent article in The Diplomat, Kunwar Khuldune Shahid argued that in China “the jihadists and Baloch separatist militia … have found a common enemy.”
While it is unclear whether China will be regarded as a “common enemy,” it does seem that a vocabulary through which Chinese economic projects in Pakistan can be seen and discussed is emerging. The result is China becoming legible to more people and in this context, China’s legibility may also be its vulnerability.
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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 Orange Line station interior. Source: King Eliot, Wikimedia Commons.
