Pakistan’s Gwadar Port: Strategic Strong Point for China or Stranded Asset?

For Western analysts, the early construction and development of a Chinese-operated port at Gwadar in Pakistan was not solely an example of globalization being spread by one of its principal economic engines. It was also evidence of an imagined “string of pearls” strategy to build a network of ports and logistics hubs across the Indian Ocean, linking China’s insatiable economy with energy supplies in the Middle East, and providing geographic footholds to possibly project influence and power in the future. 

Nearly 20 years after construction began at Gwadar, the project once touted as a major new economic hub and still discussed as a possible de facto Chinese naval base does not appear on track to realize either vision. A team of China scholars at the U.S. Naval War College’s Chinese Maritime Studies Institute – Isaac Kardon, Conor Kennedy, and Peter Dutton – recently completed an evaluation of Gwadar’s potential as a strategic springboard for China in the Indian Ocean.

They find a massive Chinese undertaking that nevertheless appears inadequate to realize its economic ambitions and strategic geography. Gwadar port is enmeshed in both China’s external and domestic security anxieties but seems little closer to satisfying them than it is to turning a profit.

Senior Chinese leaders pay unusual attention to the projects in Pakistan developed as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Xi Jinping called them “flagship” priorities of the Belt and Road Initiative and highlighted the port at Gwadar as a critical pillar of CPEC. Gwadar’s strategic attractiveness to Chinese strategists and leadership lay in its geographic location, providing an “exit to the sea” overland through Pakistan’s long border with the Xinjiang autonomous region in western China. 

Myanmar and India, which has an ongoing and contentious border dispute with China, are the only other countries with both a coast on the Indian Ocean and a shared border with China. Because China’s entire eastern and southern coasts are ringed by strategic competitors and skeptical neighbors interspersed with a robust U.S. military presence, Beijing eyes Indian Ocean “exits” to provide it with alternative routes for commerce and energy in the event its sea lanes are threatened.

But the original sales pitch for Gwadar was entirely economic, with a world-class commercial port, airports, and a “free trade area” to be modeled after China’s Special Economic Zones, powerhouses like Shanghai and Guangzhou. The project was supposed to revitalize the impoverished Balochistan region, help stabilize Pakistan, and enrich Chinese investors. The mostly vacant piers, warehouses, and yards at Gwadar give lie to that promise, leading many to speculate what some analysts believed from the beginning: That China’s real interest was to establish a stealth naval base in the Indian Ocean.

Speculation of China’s military intentions for the port aside, in contrast to its much newer facilities in Djibouti, there is not yet any People’s Liberation Army base in Gwadar. It does have ample space and capacity for warships and materiel and is used widely by the Pakistani Navy, but has yet to host Chinese warships, which prefer to call on the port at Karachi. The authors also point out that Gwadar’s latent potential as an overseas naval base is hampered by the lack of firm political commitments between China and Pakistan that would guarantee the PLA Navy access to Gwadar during a conflict. Absent such a wartime guarantee, it is unclear what advantages Gwadar offers to the PLA Navy over Pakistan’s more established ports as a way station between the Pacific and the Middle East.

Irrespective of profitability, the port’s potential to alleviate China’s energy security concerns also appears to have been overestimated. The report cites admittedly optimistic Chinese reports that overland pipelines have the potential to reduce China’s reliance on sea-borne energy imports by 85 percent, reducing or even eliminating its “Malacca dilemma,” the potential vulnerability of crucial trade through the Straits of Malacca to an adversary’s blockade. But the capacity of the pipelines China has built through Pakistan so far cannot even keep pace with the annual growth of its demand for overseas energy imports (pre-COVID-19), let alone able to reduce that dependency.

So why does Gwadar earn such high-visibility attention from senior Chinese leadership?

Western analysts have long viewed China’s pursuit of military and logistics footholds in the Indian Ocean as motivated by the vulnerability of its energy imports. But China’s investments in Gwadar are materially different than other Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in the Indian Ocean region. Chinese leaders have shown personal interest. Perhaps that’s because Gwadar, through the broader CPEC project, is tied into China’s other efforts in the region. Beyond the potential to provide energy security and a laydown hub for naval logistics, the authors present impressive evidence that China’s interest in Gwadar is instrumental to its broader objectives to support Pakistan’s political and societal stability to attenuate China’s own perceived problems with unrest among its Muslim population in Xinjiang. 

China perceives radicalism in Pakistan as a significant threat to its control over the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. Its leaders believe that prosperity and modernization in Pakistan’s less developed regions will diminish the threat it thinks Islamic radicalism in Pakistan poses to China’s internal security priorities. Thus, while it’s unclear whether China’s extraordinary authoritarian measures to control Xinjiang’s Uyghur population were motivated originally or principally out of concern for the security of its internal links to CPEC, or CPEC was instrumental to the control of Xinjiang, those objectives appear mutually supportive in the minds of China’s leadership at this point.

There is some irony, then, that China’s CPEC investments, meant to diminish instability among Muslim populations, are not only highly vulnerable to that unrest but may also inflame it.

Gwadar is situated in the substantially more remote Balochistan province, home to a long-running, low intensity insurgency against the government of Pakistan. While the conflict has appeared to wane in recent years, an increased Chinese presence, either commercial or military, could contribute to a resurgence in violence and unrest rather than abate it, undermining what appears to be the stabilizing motivation behind the entire project. Already, Baloch nationalists have attacked perceived Chinese interests in Balochistan and even farther afield in Karachi, with attacks on the Pakistan Stock Exchange in June and on the Chinese consulate in 2018.

It may be that even the enormity of China’s efforts in Pakistan – some $87 billion has been pledged for CPEC projects, for which Gwadar is the critical hub – remains dwarfed by the scale of the geographic, economic, and social challenges that Pakistan poses, and in particular the Balochistan region. The report highlights how high visibility but singular symbols of progress in Gwadar’s development, such as a convoy of 100 containers from Xinjiang in 2016, end up looking more like expensive but materially paltry publicity stunts than evidence of the project’s viability. 

For now China seems to have bought itself some limited strategic options at Gwadar, but ones that demand substantial additional investment and time to realize. If China’s leaders believe that their programs of imprisonment, re-education, and cultural erasure of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang have delivered the level of societal control Beijing desires, they may no longer see the incentive to make the additional investments that appear necessary to make Gwadar and CPEC either economic or strategic successes.