Xi picks Pakistan dam as first stop on USD40b Silk Road

Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives with his wife Peng Liyuan at Nur Khan airbase in Islamabad

China picked a dam project in northern Pakistan for its first investment by a USD40 billion Silk Road infrastructure fund as President Xi Jinping looks to expand the country’s influence across three continents.
The fund will become a shareholder of China Three Gorges South Asia Investment Ltd., which will construct the Karot dam on the Jhelum river, according to a statement on the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s website yesterday. The total investment will be USD1.65 billion, according to the People’s Bank of China.
“We don’t subscribe to the view that a country expands hegemony when it becomes powerful,” Xi told Pakistani lawmakers yesterday. “Peaceful development is in China’s interest and also in the interest of Asia and the world.”
Xi’s visit is the first by a Chinese head of state in almost a decade to Pakistan, a nation that’s key to his efforts to access the Indian Ocean over land and boost trade with Europe, Africa and the Middle East. China is Pakistan’s top trading partner, and they have a mutual distrust of India.
The two nations are planning $45 billion in projects along a 3,000-kilometer corridor stretching from Xinjiang in western China to Gwadar on the Arabian Sea. The investments – $28 billion of which were announced this week – would boost Pakistan’s economic growth and provide another route for China to import oil from the Middle East.
The Karot dam will be located in Rawalpindi near the capital Islamabad. It’s a “great match” between the development strategies of the two nations and a priority project in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, China’s central bank said in its statement.
The 720-megawatt run-of-river dam would take about six years to build, according to project disclosure documents filed by the World Bank’s International Finance Corp., which is investing $125 million in China Three Gorges South Asia Investment Ltd. The project would generate 75 percent of its energy during the summer months when water flow in the Jhelum river is at its highest, the documents show. Ting Shi and Natalie Obiko Pearson, Bloomberg