Suchergebnisse

Pakistan's mountainous north borders China. Deepening bilateral ties, together with increasing investments from within Pakistan, have amplified local anxiety over loss of control over resources. A complicated history left the area with multiple land tenure systems. Much of this region, today known as Gilgit-Baltistan, is disputed with India. Consequently, it has a constitutionally liminal status and its people do not enjoy equal citizenship rights. With the construction of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, a major part of the global Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese influence has been entangled in local histories and political economies.

In February 2002, a Chinese State-Owned Enterprise (SOE), Sinotrans Xinjiang, partnered with a local Pakistani collective, the Silk Route Dry Port Trust, to finance and operate a dry port in mountainous north Pakistan. Given minimal overland trade between China and Pakistan, this was an unlikely place for investment by a subsidiary of one of China's largest SOEs. Individuals who commanded extensive social networks and possessed local knowledge were instrumental in brokering the joint venture. Brokers both Chinese and Pakistani leveraged the implicit power of money to create a new institution, the dry port joint venture, that helped normalize the presence and operations of Chinese business leaders in north Pakistan. The joint venture also enabled Pakistani strongmen to exert their control over local land and draw funds from a public bank, activities that ultimately undermined the joint venture itself. This episode is more than just a cautionary tale of an unsuccessful joint venture between a Chinese SOE and local partners. The episode highlights how, in an epoch of transnational financialization, money empowered local leaders, public officials, and official organizations to engage in and indeed benefit from loss-making activities that combine both regular and irregular processes.

AbstractLocated along Pakistan's central Asian margins, the high mountain region of Gilgit-Baltistan borders Afghanistan and India, and since 1969 has connected Pakistan to China. In this article, I argue that over the last 50 years, expanding forms of connectivity between Pakistan and China were localized in Gilgit-Baltistan through three processes: (1) from 1969, overland connectivity between Gilgit-Baltistan and western China has enabled Pakistan to imagine and project expansive ties—and geopolitical aspirations—that transcend the border areas where the cross-border trade was initially localized; (2) unfolding ties between the two countries were accompanied by new material exchanges: initially barter trade and regulated caravans, followed by private commerce in the mid-1980s and, finally, economic corridor development under the Belt and Road Initiative; and (3) Chinese investments in Pakistan were part of a new cycle of global accumulation. Concurrently, in the wake of transnational investments, local governance in Gilgit-Baltistan adopted neoliberal administrative measures: the prioritizing of investment capitalism, the privatization of public goods and services, and securitization.

This article asks, (1) Why did Afiyatabad, a nondescript bazaar along the Pakistan-China border, emerge along an uninhabited stretch of the Karakoram highway?, and (2) How did Afiyatabad adapt—through bazaar infrastructure, local capital investment, and labor migration—first to state-led development, and more recently, to the promise of economic corridor development? The article illustrates how Afiyatabad emerged from unfolding border regimes on Pakistan's central Asian margins since the 1980s. More recently, the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), one of six corridors under Beijing's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is channeling upwards of $50 billion of Chinese investment into Pakistan. Yet this border locale has seen little benefit. This article argues that current transborder investments, corresponding infrastructure development, and new assemblages such as economic corridors are moving capital between increasingly distant nodes, in the process leaving places such as Afiyatabad behind.

AbstractThis article explores some of the ways in which language was central to the construction of