THE Long Term Plan for CPEC ‘launched’ by the government on
Monday is, as feared, only an abridged, abbreviated, and heavily edited
version of the longer document upon which it is based. Nevertheless, for
now this will do. More transparency is required in the CPEC enterprise,
because people need to understand that it is far bigger than roads,
power plants and transit trade. Those elements have been hyped up by our
government for its own reasons, but they do not define the enterprise.
This
is a good time to ask the government why there is such a visceral
reaction every time questions are asked about CPEC, and specifically why
there was such a visceral reaction to the Dawn report on the LTP back
in May. The question is simple: please identify a single discrepancy
between the LTP officially released by the government on Monday, and
what was published in the Dawn story back in May.
That
story was based on the longer version of the LTP document prepared by
the China Development Bank and the National Development Reform
Commission of China. In terms of the broad “areas of cooperation”
identified in both documents, there is no difference. Both versions talk
about facilitating the entry of Chinese capital into Pakistan. Both
talk about developing tourist resorts, with the locations identified
being the same. Both documents talk about the extensive financial
cooperation between both countries, with special focus on expanding the
role of the yuan within Pakistan’s economy, for settlement of bilateral
trade and as a reserve asset, as well as raising debt in
yuan-denominated bonds by federal, provincial and municipal governments.
The longer version contains details that take most
people by surprise, simply because people don’t know that the CPEC
enterprise goes as far and as deep as the LTP lays out. The shorter
version, released by the government on Monday, provides only abbreviated
pointers, general statements that speak in brushstrokes alone, about
where things are supposed to go in the future.
This is a good time to ask the government why there is such a visceral reaction every time questions are asked about CPEC?
A close reading of the 26 pages of the LTP released by the
government is enough to establish this. When the plan says, for example,
that Pakistan will “encourage Chinese enterprises, private sectors and
private sector funds of other economic entities to make various forms of
direct investment”, it is worthwhile to bear in mind that there is a
massive, heavily worked out, reality behind these seemingly simple
words.
Those details, of what ‘encourage’ means, and
where all this investment will come and in what sectors, are contained
in the longer version of the LTP, that the government will not release.
It
goes on. On the financial side, the document contains sentences such as
“[e]ffective ways shall be explored for Pakistan’s federal and
provincial governments, enterprises and financial institutions to
conduct RMB financing in Mainland China, Hong Kong and other offshore
RMB centres”.
Translation: expect to hear more about
provincial governments floating RMB bonds in Hong Kong, if they want to
foot the bill for the projects they are asking for.
Here’s
another: “Both countries shall promote the mutual opening of their
financial sector and the establishment of financial institutions in each
other; encourage financial institutions of the two countries to support
the financing, including the loans from international consortium of
banks, for the projects along the CPEC; establish and improve a
cross-border credit system, and promote financial services such as
export credit, project financing, syndicated loan, trade finance,
investment bank, cross-border RMB business, financial market, assets
management, e-bank, and financial lease; support the project financing
by RMB loans, and establish the evaluation model of power bill in RMB.”
There
is nothing wrong with any of this, but it certainly points towards a
growing role for the RMB in our economy, quite aside from the fact that
exactly this sort of thing is detailed in the longer version upon which
the Dawn story was based, which the government is trying to tell us is
“incorrect”.
What exactly was ‘incorrect’ here? This was
the document developed within the JCC framework, and finalised at the
sixth JCC meeting for forwarding to the respective governments for all
internal reviews prior to finalisation. If it changed in substantial
form between then and the actual finalisation, please tell us where,
because the abbreviated and abridged version released on Monday points
in exactly the same directions as those contained within the document
upon which the Dawn story was based.
The other thing that
is difficult to understand about this discourse is why simply
publishing the details of the plan should be considered as stoking
controversy. First of all, the details of the LTP are different from the
details of CPEC as presented by the government, so it is natural that
they will attract journalistic attention. Second, there is nothing
‘unnecessary’ about any ensuing controversies, given that the government
itself describes CPEC as a ‘game-changing’ endeavour. Any agreement
that is going to be ‘game changing’ will necessarily need to be
scrutinised, debated and discussed, and in the course of this exercise,
there will necessarily be divergent points of view that will need to
engage with each other.
Third, why should the
conversation that ensues from a disclosure of the details of the LTP be
described as a ‘controversy’? Since people have been misled into
thinking that CPEC is about nothing more than China building power
plants and roads in Pakistan as preparation for eventual long-distance
transit trade, naturally there will be surprise when they learn that the
enterprise is, in reality, about something very different.
In
reality, CPEC is about allowing Chinese enterprises to assume dominant
positions in all dynamic sectors of Pakistan’s economy, as well as a
‘strategic’ direction that is often hinted at but never fleshed out in
the JCC meetings and the LTP. All else is distraction. The LTP put out
by the government on Monday is enough to discern this.