What engagement can we expect under CPEC 2.0? Victor Gao shares his views

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Victor, China has been a major investor in Pakistan through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, known as C Pac, and as June just pointed out, that is now advancing to C Pac 2.0. This is an important part of China's Belt and Road Initiative. The focus will now shift from infrastructure development to very robust industrialization in Pakistan. What sort of engagement can we expect?

[00:00:28]Indeed, while the China's Belt and Road Initiative has involved more than 160 countries in different parts of the world, the C Pac project between China and Pakistan is the largest single project with the highest capital intensity and also with the longest expected contribution to the national economy development of Pakistan as well as China. So, let's put this C Pac really in historical and in contemporary perspective, and I truly believe this project will help uplift millions of people out of poverty in Pakistan and accelerate the pathway for organization in Pakistan for the coming years and for the coming decades. Now, the infrastructure connectivity, highways, railways, pipelines, electricity, power generation, etc. have been put in place. What is needed is more and more large, medium-sized, and small enterprises, which will generate lots of jobs for the Pakistani community. Now, to achieve this goal, of crucial importance to it is to maintain domestic stability inside Pakistan, and we know for sure there are, for example, terrorist activities, instabilities of all kinds, and etc. And I hope China and Pakistan can join hands and put a quick end to this domestic instability, sometimes with the roots are beyond the national boundary of Pakistan. That means international cooperation, regional cooperation, and security cooperation within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, for example, to really be tightened up to make sure that Pakistan is not going to suffer the pains of its domestic instability, sometimes caused by overseas forces. And we want to make sure that between China and Pakistan, our cooperation will result in a situation where there will be less and less, hopefully no more casualties for the Chinese professionals, workers, academics, for example, working inside Pakistan. Each time I have a chance to visit Pakistan, I always emphasize this point. It is absolutely necessary to keep peace, maintain stability, and promote development. You cannot miss any of these three pillars. And especially when we are talking about huge, billions of dollars of infrastructure investment, and uh we really need to make sure that these large, long-standing projects will be free from menace created by hostile forces, both inside Pakistan as well as outside, to make sure that the people in Pakistan and in China can benefit from the long-standing, sustainable contribution of these large infrastructure projects. On top of that, I think Azum and the other panelists also mentioned, China now is the leading country in the AI development together with the United States. We follow different pathways, of course. We have different paradigms, but I think China-Pakistan cooperation in accelerating Pakistan's AI participation will be crucially important. I coined a term called the AI divide. Never find yourself on the wrong side of AI divide, and China's effort is to make sure that the AI divide, whenever it exists, will be narrowed rather than widened, and international cooperation, especially China-Pakistan cooperation in AI, will make sure that both China and Pakistan will benefit from China's increasing involvement and contribution to the major AI breakthroughs in the world.