A Broad Structural Approach
Rajesh Rajagopalan
CHINA-PAKISTAN RELATIONS: A HISTORICAL ANALYSIS by Ghulam Ali Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2018, 263 pp., 1225
January 2018, volume 42, No 1

China-Pakistan relation is among the most fascinating in the post-Second World War international politics. It is one of the closest and longest strategic relationships in the contemporary international system, surviving changes of governments and domestic and international turmoil, and continuing to gather strength even after the end of the bipolar Cold War period in which it initially formed. It is fascinating also because it was such an unlikely partnership: a feudal, conservative, western-oriented, formally US-aligned, and military-dominated and explicitly religion-based state with a revolutionary and radical regime. At the same time, this is a relationship that is also a reflection of the quintessential reality of international relations: it is national self-interest rather than principles that determine alliances. And this is the truth of it: the determinant of the durability and stability of this relationship is their shared interest in balancing, countering and containing India, a country that both sides saw as a threat. Though the magnitude of this threat that Pakistan and China saw from India was obviously different because of the power differential between China and Pakistan, the threat itself was sufficiently large as to make the variation in the level of threat inconsequential to the relationship. And as the pace of the China-India confrontation grows, this relationship will only get stronger because China increasingly feels the pressure of India’s power.

While such a broad structural view of the power relations is useful, it can also be limiting because it leaves out much of the detail. Diplomatic history, if finely told, can make up for this lacuna. But diplomatic history is notoriously difficult to write because of the natural secrecy that governments adopt in the realms of foreign and security policies, the easy and practised dissembling in public statements and official narratives, and the inaccessibility of original documentation, especially on contemporary and near-contemporary records. This is made even more difficult when dealing with authoritarian governments, as in Pakistan and China, though this could be a problem even in more open democracies too.

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