The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

by Daniel Yergin

The biggest project to date, by far, is the $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Almost 70 percent of it is for electric power–related investment. The rest is for highways, oil and gas pipelines, and most notably a major port at the coastal town of Gwadar, located strategically on the way to the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal. A putative landmark for the Maritime Silk Road, the port could be a convenient stopping point for the Chinese navy. Gwadar is connected to China not only by sea. At great cost and with extraordinary difficulty—including surmounting the sixteen-thousand-foot Khunjerab Pass, the highest border crossing in the world—a modern expanded highway system has been built to move goods from China to Gwadar. As the Hong Kong newspaper the South China Morning Post pointedly observed, the Gwadar port-and-road system provides “an alternative shipping route to the Malacca Strait, which is frequently patrolled by the United States.”15 The Chinese investment in the power sector is increasing electricity supplies, desperately needed in a power-short country, and thus helping Pakistani manufacturing and export. Yet at the same time, Pakistan’s import bill has shot up owing to the costs of importing of goods from China for the projects. The country is behind on repaying the Chinese loans, and its indebtedness is rising rapidly. This sent Pakistan back to the International Monetary Fund in 2019 for its twelfth bailout since the late 1980s. And because of the larg...