Chinese scholar Prof. Cheng Xizhong termed the PM Imran Khan’s visit to China as highly success-ful, as it yielded fruitful results, according to a re-port published by Gwadar Pro on Sunday.
He noted that PM Imran Khan held a series of important meetings with the Chinese authorities, business circles, academia and media, which were very sincere, friendly and pragmatic, and achieved fruitful results, leaving a deep impression on the Chinese people that Pakistan is indeed a good friend.
He believes that the fruitful results are mainly reflected in the three aspects: “First, China and Pakistan signed a series of important cooperation documents, especially the Framework Agreement on Industrial Cooperation under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
The Framework Agreement on Industrial Coop-eration between the Board of Investment (BOI) of Pakistan and the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) of China will facilitate the relocation of China’s industrial units to CPEC Spe-cial Economic Zones (SEZs) and accelerate China’s investment and industrial and technological scale transfer to Pakistan so that large-scale production and export of modern industrial products can be quickly formed in Pakistan.
Second, PM Imran Khan and his delegation had extensive interactions with the executives of Chi-nese state-owned and private corporate sectors, offering a conducive environment for investment in SEZs, having greatly stimulated the enthusiasm of Chinese enterprises to invest in Pakistan.
Many Chinese companies immediately ex-pressed that they were keen to expand investment in Pakistan in projects related to energy, textile, fiber-optics networks, housing, dairy, water management and recycling of metals and paper, etc. while some other enterprises expressed their desire to establish a $3.5 billion reprocessing park in Gwadar and a $350 million textile cluster near Lahore.
The Chinese textile firm, reputed for high ex-port-quality apparel, planned to build a textile clus-ter on over 100 acres of land near Lahore, which would create around 20,000 jobs. The representatives of three major agricultural firms wanted to jointly establish a modernization research lab and a demonstration plot to improve yield and seed quality in Pakistan. —INP