Opinion: How China wins the hearts and minds of Pakistan

At the foot of Islamabad’s lush green Shakarparian hills stands the Pakistan-China Friendship Centre. Designed by state-owned China IPPR International Engineering with a Chinese grant of PKR 3 billion, the centre was a gift of the Chinese government to the people of Pakistan in 2010.

Two years later, I found myself there for the opening ceremony of the South Asian Youth Conference. Young delegates from across the South Asian subcontinent were visibly impressed by the grandeur of the building.  

The choice of venue was telling. We were celebrating South Asian unity under the roof of a landmark dedicated to Pakistan’s friendship with China.  

That memory returned this September, when Pakistan and China activated a boundary joint commission and New Delhi reiterated that “there is no boundary between Pakistan and China”.

The two countries first agreed to set up the commission in 2013, during Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s visit to Islamabad, but it remained inactive for 13 years. Its revival, with joint surveys and trade coordination at the Khunjerab Pass, which connects Gilgit-Baltistan in disputed Kashmir with China’s Xinjiang, moves the arrangement from paper to practice. 

Karakoram Highway over Khunjerab Pass between China and Pakistan is the highest elevation International Border Crossing in the world

India reads the partnership as a strategic challenge. Beijing has invested more than USD 60 billion mainly under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and supplied 80 percent of Pakistan’s arms imports between 2021 and 2025. But looking through the strategic lens alone misses something important.  

The Pakistan-China bond is not only a pact between regimes and generals. It is also anchored in public sentiment. Pew’s 2026 survey found that nine in ten Pakistanis view China favourably. Only 15 percent say the same of the United States, despite President Donald Trump’s bonhomie with his “favourite field marshal” Asim Munir and of the provision of over USD 30 billion in US aid since 1948. 

While Washington has been pumping money into the Pakistani state, it is Beijing that appears to have won the hearts of the Pakistani masses. The question is how did an avowedly atheist state earned such goodwill in an Islamic republic? The answer lies less in what Beijing offers than in what it chooses to publicly ignore.  

An unlikely kinship 

Chinese and Pakistan border guards at Khunjerab Pass

Pakistan was carved out in 1947 as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims on the basis of the Two-Nation Theory.

The 1973 Constitution of Pakistan declares that “Islam shall be the State religion of Pakistan”. On the other hand, China is governed by the Communist Party of China whose leaders insist its members be "unyielding Marxist atheists", though its constitution guarantees citizens "freedom of religious belief". The state officially recognises five religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Catholicism, Protestantism and lastly, Islam – which has drawn particular international attention.

China is home to more than 20 million Muslims, and global bodies, including the UN human rights office, have raised concerns about the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region – claims Beijing has repeatedly rejected. 

In principle, faith should have divided these two countries. Instead, the relationship has thrived because both sides kept a respectful distance from each other’s religious differences, opting instead for a vocabulary of strategic kinship. 

In January 1950, Pakistan formally recognised the People’s Republic, and diplomatic relations followed in May 1951. The two share their only land frontier high in the Karakoram, linking Xinjiang with Gilgit-Baltistan, part of the disputed Kashmir region.

In 1963, months after China’s war with India, they signed a boundary agreement under which Pakistan ceded the Shaksgam tract to China, an agreement India has never recognised. A year later, Pakistan International Airlines became the first airline from a non-communist country to fly into the People’s Republic.

In the 1965 India-Pakistan war, Beijing openly backed Pakistan and supplied arms, laying the foundations of a lasting security partnership. 

Trucks from China waiting to clear Pakistan customs at the border inspection town of Sost, Pakistan, on the Karakoram Highway

Across the China-Pakistan land frontier runs the most enduring symbol of the friendship – a road.

The Karakoram Highway, built jointly from 1966 and completed in 1978, claimed the lives of about 200 Chinese labourers and more than 800 Pakistanis. It remains the main artery between the two countries and a lifeline for remote northern valleys.

Rishtay aur Raastay (Bonds and Roads), a television drama co-produced by PTV and China’s CCTV to mark the highway’s opening to the public in 1986, traced three generations of its builders.

In 2021, ISPR, the Pakistani military’s media wing, released a documentary honouring those who died. Shared sacrifice became shared memory, and shared memory became soft power.  

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), launched by President Xi Jinping in April 2015, fits the same template. Such projects set the tone of the alliance. Beijing delivered roads, infrastructure, arms and diplomatic support, and none of it came with conditions of ideology, faith or governance. 

A pact of mutual silence 

Pakistan largely turns a blind eye to humanitarian concerns in China's Xinjiang region

The contrast with the West is instructive. Washington publishes an annual assessment of religious freedom in Pakistan, and in 2021 the European Parliament called for a review of Pakistan’s trade preferences over its blasphemy laws.

Where Western partners bundle assistance with public accountability and certain conditions, Beijing has de-linked the two. It calls this the principle of non-interference, which President Xi has described as a golden rule of international relations.

A China-Pakistan joint statement in May 2026 reaffirmed their “unyielding support for each other” on core interests. For a country that often comes under fire for its treatment of religious minorities and blasphemy laws, a partner that refrains from public criticism is easier to embrace.  

Beijing has not been shy of courting Pakistan’s religious parties, for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons.

In 2009, after a Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan(an Islamist political party and social movement) delegation visited Beijing at the Communist Party’s invitation, party chief Qazi Hussain Ahmad announced a Memorandum of Understanding that, he claimed, would allow Jamaat to invite Chinese atheists to Islam through peaceful preaching. In the same breath, he affirmed Jamaat’s support for Beijing’s positions on Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang. The bargain was clear. An Islamist party gained a symbolic opening in an atheist state, and Beijing gained an Islamist voice endorsing its core positions. 

The outreach mirrored a practice Beijing had refined at home, where the party-state enlists religion in its own service. Research on state-sanctioned Islam in Xinjiang shows that officials promoted patriotism as “an Islamic virtue”, put some 28,600 religious scholars through patriotic training from 2001, and issued approved sermons whose first theme was that nationalism and patriotism are a part of faith.  

As Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan put it in 2021, “whatever issues we have with the Chinese, we speak to them behind closed doors”. 

China is home to over 20 million Muslims, mostly living in Xinjiang autonomous region in China's northwest

For many years, Beijing repeatedly blocked UN Security Council proposals to list Jaish-e-Mohammed (a Pakistan-based Deobandi Islamist militant group) chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, lifting its hold only in May 2019.

In diplomacy, silence is rarely empty. Between Beijing and Islamabad, it works as a currency, spent judiciously on sensitive matters.   

Where the two societies meet 

Among ordinary people, however, the record of engagement is more uneven. Nearly 29,000 Pakistanis were studying in China by December 2025, while the last reported estimate from 2019 put Chinese students in Pakistan at around 1,000.

Cross-border marriages have produced some genuine unions, but in 2019 Pakistani investigators compiled a list of 629 women and girls allegedly sold as brides to Chinese men, many from poor Christian families.

A Lahore-born Pakistani of Chinese descent recalled being called “ching chong” and “corona” during the Covid-19 pandemic, suggesting that racist slurs are part of the lived cultural experience of some people of Chinese descent in Pakistan. 

The sharpest friction lies in Balochistan, home to the Gwadar port and CPEC’s flagship projects, where separatists accuse China of exploiting the province’s resources. Militant attacks have killed at least 21 Chinese workers since 2017, prompting Pakistan to raise dedicated security forces to protect them. 

Such incidents, however, remain localised, and the broader sentiment of the Pakistan-China relationship is one of warmth.

The military, civilian parties and the clergy share a pro-China consensus that filters down to the common people. This was evident after the May 2025 conflict with India, when Pakistan’s claims of success with Chinese-built J-10C fighter jets made the aircraft a national emblem.

At a Rawalpindi rally on 12 May, a young boy was photographed holding a placard of the jet. The image showed how a China-made weapon system had entered the public consciousness of the Pakistani awaam or people, turning defence cooperation into popular sentiment. 

Lessons in influence 

The Pakistani case offers three broader insights into Chinese influence. The first is the cultivation of dependence.

China’s goodwill is anchored in development finance and deep military cooperation, underwritten by elite networks and blessed by the Pakistani awaam.

Influence rooted at both ends of society can absorb attacks on Chinese workers, a trafficking scandal or a street-level slur, because no single episode outweighs elite interest or popular affection. 

The second is the decoupling of the relationship from sensitive internal questions, from the treatment of minorities to terrorism. The approach is transactional yet gift-wrapped as a friendship both sides label as “higher than the Himalayas, deeper than the Indian Ocean and sweeter than honey”. 

The third is the conversion of assistance into memory.

From the Karakoram Highway to a boy’s placard in Rawalpindi, Chinese help has been woven into Pakistan’s national story, a soft power that money rarely buys.

The dividends are considerable: China has earned an all-weather friend in a pivotal corner of South Asia, with access to the Arabian Sea through Gwadar, leverage on India’s western front and a corridor into Afghanistan. 

Together, these reflect calibrated engagement: selective support paired with strategic silence.

Beijing is generous where it matters most to Pakistan, in finance, weapons and diplomatic backing, and silent where it could offend the elites – on faith, governance and minorities. What emerges is an alliance built on hard power, peppered with soft power and sealed with silence.  

In Pakistan, China has shown that a state need not share a people’s faith to win their hearts. It only needs to leave that faith alone.

The Foundation's Asia in Focus initiative publishes expert insights and analysis on issues across Asia, as well as New Zealand’s evolving relationship with the region.