Pakistan and China announced a “new broad consensus” on deepening their economic and security partnership on Tuesday, with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Chinese Premier Li Qiang releasing a joint statement at the close of a four-day Beijing visit that promises an upgraded China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and a deliberate push to make Gwadar port a regional logistics hub.
The headline figure attached to the visit was a package of investment memorandums worth roughly $7 billion across energy, transport and industrial parks, of which Sharif told reporters about 30 percent had already been converted into binding agreements. The remainder, his office said, was structured as conditional commitments tied to security guarantees that Pakistan’s interior ministry has been working on through the year.
CPEC was launched in 2015 as China’s flagship Belt and Road project in South Asia, but the corridor has stalled repeatedly since 2019 as Pakistan’s balance-of-payments crisis deepened and as attacks on Chinese workers, particularly in Balochistan, rattled investor confidence. The joint statement promises a complete renegotiation of the 1,300-kilometre Karakoram Highway upgrade and a fresh security pact under which Pakistani military escorts will be stationed at all CPEC industrial parks.
Gwadar receives the second-most extensive mention in the statement. The port, which sits at the western end of the corridor on the Arabian Sea, has long been seen by Chinese planners as a potential alternative to the Strait of Malacca for oil and bulk shipping; under the new agreement it will receive a deep-water container terminal, a new container ship-repair yard, and a tax-free zone covering 2,300 hectares of adjacent land.
Sharif framed the visit as a counterweight to economic pressure his government has come under from the United States during the months-long war between Washington and Iran, which has compressed Pakistan’s import bill, raised energy costs and pushed inflation back above 12 percent. Pakistan’s State Bank governor Jameel Ahmad, travelling with the delegation, said the country’s reserves had “stabilised in the upper twenties of billions” but that fresh inflows were essential to maintaining external accounts.
Pakistan’s provisional GDP growth for the 2025-26 fiscal year stood at 3.70 percent, with the overall economy crossing the $452 billion threshold for the first time, according to figures released last week. Independent economists in Karachi say the new Chinese commitments could lift growth toward 4.5 percent in 2026-27 but warn that the security premium attached to Chinese projects has not gone away.
On the security side, the joint statement uses unusually explicit language. Beijing committed to “assist Pakistan in capacity-building against threats to its national integrity,” a passage Pakistani officials read as a pledge of intelligence-sharing and, possibly, surveillance equipment for the Balochistan corridor. Indian foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in Delhi that India would “closely watch any deployment that affects regional stability.”