NAVEED AMAN KHAN
RENOWNED CPEC analyst Malik Muhammad Ishaq one of the leading business icons of Paki stan is running his diverse businesses in Pakistan, UK, UAE, USA, China, Europe and Africa. He is a big story of success. At breakfast on Edgware Road London we as usual discussed economic development of Great Britain, America, China France, Germany and Pakistan. Aboutthe strong and stable economies of developed countries, he was of the view that UK, USA, France and Germany have history of centuries oldindustrial development while China has achieved such goals during last three decades. He names formerChinese President Deng Xiaoping father of revolutionary industrial development of modern China. He believes that America can’t contain Chinese industrialized economic development for more than one decade. “Just look at its hold on Hong Kong. President Xi Jinping has given splendour to Deng Xiaoping’s lines of economic development avoiding tension with other countries.BRIis a welfare project.Through BRI China is focusing business with entire world especiallythird world countries.China because ofits economic policies has captured almost all the world potential markets. Even in America, UK and Europe Chinese products are available in abundance in the markets. Within very short span of time China has transformed itself from low technology to high technology. China has transformed its agriculture and industry with latest technology. China has invested US $ 64 billion in CPEC. Gwadar, because of CPEC, has acquired pivotal importance. We needto focus onthe brisk development of Gwadar. If China can develop many cities; why can’t we? Only by rapidly developing and making Gwadar an international city Pakistan can addressits unemploymentissue.We need to develop and modernise northern areas of Pakistan too.” “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 and the nation. 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, reason being our youth believes in hope. To become an upright nation we will have to focus on unity, faith and discipline, the saying of founder of the nation”, Malik Ishaq continued. “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 employmentto atleast one million skilled and unskilled Pakistanis only by developing real-estate sector in the entire country especially Gwadar because it will engage several relevant industries.”Answering my question about the pace of development and production of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor he uttered, “the production is continuing unhindered but the pace is slow. It needs to be accelerated. 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 workinAmerica and I think that you can do similar work in China on a much vaster and more significant scale. Your work in America has been more individual and personal, whereas here in China you would have an opportunity to express and embody 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 inWorldWar 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 onto dominate globalmanufacturing 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 travelled 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 we (Pakistanis) need to go ahead with the same approach. We can make it. — The writer is book ambassador, columnist, political analyst and author of several books based in Islamabad.
