Beijing is pouring money and labour into improving the highway linking the Chinese Xinjiang region to Pakistan's Northern Areas and to the sea – even as events in the former have proved disquieting.
In late June, somewhere between Gilgit and the Hunza Valley, a Chinese worker gestured a code to signal clearance after blowing a final whistle to keep onlookers as far as possible from a huge stone in middle of a road. Seconds later, a massive explosion sent a thick column of smoke and dust into the sky, soon joined by a second rumble as the echo rebounded off a mountain across the low-lying Indus River. As the dust began to settle, two loaders and an excavator were quickly put into high gear, to begin removing the debris. Before restarting their work, a few of the Chinese workers moved away from the blast site and took cigarettes out of their pockets, to sit on roadside rocks. Eventually, they turned their attention back to the job at hand: improving the Karakoram Highway, the only land link between China and Pakistan.
The highway is arguably the highest paved road in the world, connecting the two neighbours across the Karakoram mountain range through the Khunjerab Pass, at an altitude of 15,397 feet. Due to its elevation and the difficult conditions under which it was built, historians have referred to the Karakoram Highway as the 'ninth wonder of the world'. Construction of the 1300-km-long road began in 1966, jointly undertaken by Pakistan and China; the work finally came to an end in 1986, after two decades of hard labour and the loss of 810 Pakistani and 82 Chinese workers to landslides and falls. The highway's route traces one of the many paths of the ancient Silk Route.
Today, that work continues. According to Pakistani officials, more than 2500 Chinese engineers and labourers, armed with heavy road-construction machinery and supported by local employees, are working at top speed in an attempt to complete the project ahead of the scheduled target of 2011. The ultimate aim is to minimise the travel distance between Balochistan's Gwadar port (also built with Chinese assistance) and the troubled Chinese province of Xinjiang. Manzoor Elahi, a Peshawar-based businessman, says that with the widening and improvements to the highway, Chinese exporters in Xinjiang are hoping that their goods can be efficiently delivered to clients in the Gulf, West Asia and Europe, through Gwadar. From western China, after all, Shanghai and other eastern ports are some 3000 km away, while Gwadar is just half that. In this way, the improvements taking place to the highway – as well as to China's east-west railway artery, which is being extended from Kashgar (in Xinjiang) to Peshawar – should merely be seen as a northward extension of the port.