The China Factor Can't Be Ignored in the India-Pakistan Conflict Over Kashmir

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20-05-2025

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The China Factor Can't Be Ignored in the India-Pakistan Conflict Over Kashmir
Anita Inder Singh
42 minutes ago
Given China's stance favouring Pakistan, and its competition with India in the Indian Ocean, New Delhi will not welcome Beijing's mediation in their ongoing conflict.
Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Photo: X/@CMShehbaz
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There is more to the present India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir than America's mediation and announcement of a truce between India and Pakistan. That is the China factor in South Asia and the Indian Ocean (IO) area which should not be ignored either by India or the US. Pakistan and China are all-weather friends; both claim Indian territory.
In 1947, Britain's partition of its Indian empire resulted in the creation of Pakistan as a religious state on the subcontinent and India as a secular democracy, whose nationalist leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, did not see why a Muslim-majority province should not be part of its territory. This overriding ideological difference between Pakistan and India has sparked four wars since January 1948.
Kashmir lies in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent and is bordered by Afghanistan, China, India and Pakistan. Both India and Pakistan claim the whole territory as it existed before the first Indo-Pakistani war over Kashmir in 1948, barely five months after partition. Each came to control a part of it; neither gave up its claim to the whole pre-1948 state. Their tense, contested frontier is known as the Line of Control. Pakistan eventually gave China part of its area of Kashmir, which is claimed by India. That area is now part of Xinjiang and Tibet on Chinese turf.
While China has advocated an independent investigation into the Pahalgam attack and its suspects, it has also proclaimed that it will help Pakistan to uphold its sovereignty and security interests.
That is not surprising. While Islamabad shares longstanding military and investment ties with Washington, it has also cultivated a strong relationship with Beijing predicated on mutual animosity towards New Delhi.
Significantly, Pakistan has been a milestone on China's Belt-and-Road Initiative (BRI) since 2015. China has invested more than $46 billion in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), via Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). CPEC is therefore opposed by India.
CPEC connects the Gwadar Port in Pakistan's Baluchistan and Karachi in Sindh by overland routes with China's Xinjiang province. Gwadar is a little over 100 miles from the strategically important Iranian port of Chabahar. That increases the strategic importance of CPEC in South and West Asia.
Thousands of miles of roads and railways have been built, and Pakistan's capacity for power generation has also increased dramatically.
In January, China and Pakistan avowed to upgrade their economic corridor . CPEC 2.0 will focus on industrialisation, agriculture, information technology, energy and livelihood projects.
CPEC has had its problems.
Islamabad is indebted to Beijing, while Chinese nationals and companies have been attacked in Pakistan.
China wants Pakistan to provide a good business environment for Chinese investment and ensure the safety of Chinese personnel, institutions, and projects in the country. The military importance of Pakistan and China to each other to some extent explains why.
China's arms sales to Pakistan
On the military front, 81% of Pakistan's arms, including fighter jets and submarines, are imported from China, which is the world's fourth largest arms manufacturer, behind America, Russia and France.
The Chinese military aircraft and missiles used by Pakistan against the French Rafale fighters bought by India in their recent conflict have aroused widespread interest. The latest Indo-Pak conflict has offered Western countries their first chance to assess the performance of Chinese fighter planes in aerial combat. Islamabad claims that its Chinese J-10C fighters and their PL-15 air-to-air missiles prevailed over Indian military aircraft. China has also given Pakistan air-defence equipment and airborne radar aircraft.
China's arms sales have implications beyond India, whose largest arms retailer has been Russia for half a century. New Delhi has gradually reduced military dependence on Moscow and has modernised its air force over last decade by buying 62 Rafales from France. Pakistan has some 150 JF-17 fighters, most jointly made with China since 2007, and 20 J-10C aircraft that it has bought since 2022.
Military experts affirm that the ultimate test is often combat. So the US and its Indo-Pacific allies are on the alert, because China uses J-10Cs around Taiwan. Those military planes could feature in a China-America war over the island. So their performance as part of Pakistan's air force against India's are being studied by Washington and its Asian collaborators to assess what they may be confronting in the Pacific.
Within South Asia, China is also the largest arms vendor of India's neighbours Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Myanmar. China is also the top trading partner of all three countries, and given its superior economic and military progress, it offers India stiff competition, even in the latter's immediate IO neighbourhood.
Chinas clout in south Asia and Indo-Pacific
At another level, the Biden administration's hopes that India could help America to could counter China in the Indo-Pacific ignored the fact that India lacks the wherewithal to do that. India is economically and militarily far behind contemporary China. China's GDP per capita is $12,614, India's is $2,480.8. Chinas military spending is $266.85 billion, India's is $75 billion.
Pacific China has economic and strategic weight in the Indian Ocean.
Geographically, China is a Pacific power. Its security priorities are East Asia and the Western Pacific, but its economic progress has extended its influence far beyond the Pacific. China recognises India's geographical advantage in the IO but has warned that the ocean is not India's backyard.
Economics and strategy are linked: China has been quick to recognise that.
Most Asian countries – including India's neighbours Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal and Myanmar, are on board China's BRI which was inaugurated in 2013. The alacrity with which China realised and visualised the link between economics and strategy was clear from its 2015 Defense White Paper which underlined 'the new requirement of safeguarding national security and development interests'. India has no analogous strategy. Generally India's neighbours perceive it as economic slowcoach with less to offer than China.
China's heft in the Indian Ocean
Most of the trade and oil imports of India and China move through the international waters of the IO. China wants to ensure that the sea routes from Europe, Africa and the Middle East are not dominated by hostile powers including India and the US. In part, that determination also explains why it has developed the strategically important Gwadar and Karachi ports.
Additionally, Beijing's mix of economics, strategy and building of a world-class navy challenges India because China is already a major player – second only to the US – in the Great Game being played out in the Indo-Pacific. That is the tough reality that an ambitious India faces about its Chinese competitor in the IOs.
The Biden administration sold F-16 aircraft to Pakistan, and American companies hope to invest in Pakistan's large untapped minerals sector that boasts one of world's largest copper and gold deposits. But that is insufficient to counter China's clout in Pakistan.
China is Pakistan's largest trading partner. In 2024 total trade in goods between them amounted to $23 billion in 2024; US-Pakistan trade touched a mere $7.3 billion.
China's foreign minister, Wang Yi, has said that China is ready to play a constructive role in Pakistan-India ceasefire efforts. But he reiterates China's support for Pakistan's determination to safeguard its national sovereignty. He surprised India and many other countries by asserting that 'Pakistan stands at the forefront of the international fight against terrorism.'
Given China's stance favouring Pakistan, and its competition with India in the Indian Ocean, New Delhi will not welcome Beijing's mediation in their ongoing conflict. American mediation has been acceptable to both countries, if only because President Donald Trump boasted that their rulers were his very good friends. Post-armistice, he wants to increase US trade with both countries. That will not be enough.
China's overall support for Pakistan implies that if it comes to the military crunch India may find itself confronting both Pakistan and China. It would be best to keep an eye on China's economic and military interest in, and support for, Pakistan to avoid such an outcome. India must continue to make simultaneous efforts to build up its military strength and defuse the conflict while keeping watch on China and Pakistan.
Anita Inder Singh is a founding professor of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution in New Delhi. She has been a Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington DC and has taught international relations at the graduate level at Oxford and the LSE.
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