Naveed Aman Khan
BRI is a welfare project. China, because of its economic policies, has captured almost all the world potential markets. Even in the US, UK and European markets, Chinese products are available in abundance. Within a very short span of time, China has transformed its agriculture and Industry with latest technology. China has invested almost US $ 64 billion on CPEC. Gwadar has acquired pivotal importance, thanks to the CPEC. We need to focus on the brisk development of Gwadar. If China can develop many cities, why can’t Pakistan? Only by rapidly developing and making Gwadar an international city, Pakistan can address its unemployment issue. Along CPEC, we need to develop and modernize northern areas of Pakistan as well.
Renowned CPEC analyst Malik Muhammad Ishaq, one of the leading business tycoons of Pakistan, is running wide range of his diverse businesses in Pakistan, UK, UAE, USA, China, Europe and Africa. He is a big story of success in his business empire including real estate project in Gwadar, the distinguished port of Pakistan. At a lunch meeting in London, we discussed development on CPEC and hence economic development of Pakistan. CPEC is a blessing for Pakistan. Mr. Ishfaq names former Chinese President Deng Xiaoping father of industrial revolution of modern China. He believes that America is trying to contain CPEC but it can’t. For the last one decade USA and India have been trying to contain Chinese industrialized economic development but, frankly speaking, all in vain. Just look at China’s hold on Hong Kong. President Xi Jinping has given splendor to Deng Xiaoping’s lines of economic development avoiding tension with other countries. Following the same policy China is successfully moving ahead. Addressing its unemployment issue, China has engaged its manpower in all of its economic corridors thus controlling unemployment.
Our youth is very talented, passionate and capable. We need to encourage, channelize and honour positive potential of our youths. It will bring pride to the country. To make our youth useful, government of Pakistan will have to make our education system compatible with first world. Pakistan’s future is very bright. To become an upright nation, we will have to focus on unity, faith and discipline the saying of founder of the nation.
In China, new cities are being developed besides old ones. Both old and new cities are being focused for tourism. We will have to follow successful models of developed countries. We will have to make Special Economic Zones and Tax Free Zones to attract the investors. In Dubai, investors get benefits from Tax Free Zones. We will have to end political and economic uncertainty in the country. We can address our problem of unemployment by providing employment to at least one million skilled and non-skilled Pakistanis only by developing real-estate sector in the country, especially Gwadar, because it will engage several relevant industries. Work on CPEC is continuing unhindered but the pace has been a bit slow. It needs to be accelerated by all means avoiding and uttering stereo type speeches. Continual baseless charges of corruption will definitely give bad name to the nation. Our Premier, his team and diplomats will have to pull up their socks to build positive image of our homeland in the entire world. Opting Dubai Model, our government should secure interests of the end users.
The father of modern China once invited Henry Ford to China to create a new industrial system, to help the then struggling country. Sun Yat-sen, who founded the Nationalist Party and helped overthrow the ruling Qing dynasty, wrote a letter in 1924 asking Ford to visit South China, where much of the intelligence, energy and wealth of this country could be found. He continued and said, “I know and I have read of your remarkable work in America and I think that you can do similar work in China on a vaster scale. Your work in America has been more individual, whereas in China you would have an opportunity to express your mind and ideals in the enduring form of a new industrial system.” Without economic development, China was in danger of becoming the cause of the next world war, Sun added ominously, and it is more or less hopeless to expect much aid from the Governments of the Powers, a reference to the Allied Powers that triumphed in the World War I. “There is much more to hope, in my opinion, from a dynamic worker like yourself, and this is why I invite you to visit us in South China, in order to study, at first hand, what is undoubtedly one of the greatest problems of the 20th Century, Sun uttered. Henry Ford flatly refused to go to China.
China, of course, has gone on to dominate global manufacturing in part because of their reliance on the very assembly lines that were Ford’s brainchild, but not before suffering through decades of poverty, turmoil and famine in the nearly 90 years since Sun’s letter was sent. Ford, on the other hand, has badly lagged General Motors in developing its business in China. Had Henry Ford traveled to China to help organize the country’s industrialization in the 1920s, surely history would have been very different but Chinese nation itself depended on self-reliance and decades later Deng Xiaoping took gigantic initiative of massive industrialization. President Xi Jinping gave the momentum new multidimensional line and that’s it. China now proudly says, catch if you can? To steer up our country and the nation from the marshes of poverty we need to go ahead with the same approach. Successful economic vision of China has changed fate of under-developed countries. We seriously need to learn lessons from this changing truth. We will have to develop our country ourselves relying on our talented youths and potential investors. We will have to develop Gilgit-Baltistan and Gwadar the starting and ending points of CPEC ourselves. This gigantic task can’t be achieved unless government of Pakistan overcomes the challenges.
