Zubair Qureshi Islamabad
President Dr Arif Alvi, while talking to the Chinese Ambassador Nong Rong has termed CPEC a strategic project with long-term economic, financial, logistics and connectivity value for Pakistan and China, regional and other countries of the world.
This is why we would welcome other countries to partner and benefit from this project, the president said.
The president said that the full operationalization of CPEC and the planned Special Economic Zones was an important milestone and urged the Chinese IT sector to invest in SEZs and benefit from Pakistan’s cost-effective human resources, liberal investment regime, cyber data protection policy and tax incentives.
Mr. Nong Rong conveyed greetings of the Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang to the President and said that the Chinese government was fully committed to completing CPEC as fast as possible, envisaging new projects and reaching out to the Government of Pakistan to meet its immediate financial and economic needs.
During the meeting, the president emphasized the need to fully operationalize road linkages between China and Gwadar port in all weather conditions, around the year, to fully utilize their capacity and achieve their fullest potential.
He further said that Pakistan had taken tangible steps to ensure the safety and security of Chinese workers and nationals who were contributing to the development of various strategic projects.
The president said that Pakistan was learning from the steps taken by the Chinese leadership to bring millions of people out of poverty and provide health facilities at the grassroots level by adopting out-of-box solutions which multiplied the quality and efficiency of human resources and led China towards progress and prosperity.
The president also made a special reference to the Chinese Barefoot doctors who were trained and equipped with the necessary skills and tools in a record period of six months and played a pivotal role in improving the health indicators of China.
While referring to the meeting of the higher leadership, the president said that during these meetings, the friendship and cooperation in the economic, financial, communication, trade and investments were further strengthened. He appreciated that sizeable progress had been made to complete the already commissioned projects, launch new projects and move forward the ML-1 project to put the country on a fast trajectory of development.
The president said that in the current changing world scenario, China had assumed great importance in the region where Pakistan was a close partner of China to pursue peace and stability in the region. He said that close cooperation between the two countries in marketing JF-17 Aircraft in the world market would help in expediting the export of state-of-the-art fighter aircraft and meet the security needs of the buying countries.
