Following the proposal by Chinese President Li Keqiang in , [ 7 ] Onc operational, the existing 12, km journey for oil transportation to China will be reduced to just 2, km. The potential industries being set up in the CPEC special economic zones include food processing, cooking oil, ceramics, gems and jewelry, marble, minerals, agriculture machinery, iron and steel, motorbike assembling, electrical appliances, and automobiles.
Plans for a corridor stretching from the Chinese border to Pakistan's deepwater ports on the Arabian Sea date back to the s and motivated the construction of the Karakoram Highway beginning in Expansion of Gwadar Port then ceased due to political instability in Pakistan following the fall of General Pervez Musharraf and the subsequent conflict between the Pakistani state and Taliban militants. Since the early s, the IMF has provided more than a dozen bailouts to Pakistan to save its dwindling economy, which has struggled for 22 of the past 30 years to meet the austerity measures demanded by the IMF.
Nadeem-ul-Haque, a former IMF official and former deputy chairman of the Pakistani government's Planning Commission , wrote, "The pattern is always the same. With the Fund's blessing, the government goes on a shopping spree, taking out costly loans for expensive projects, thus building up even more debt and adding new inefficiencies.
After a few years, another crisis ensues, and it is met by another IMF program. Although China and Pakistan signed the official MoUs in , the first details of the long-term plan under CPEC were publicly disclosed in when a Pakistani media outlet revealed access to the original documents.
Chinese President Xi Jinping described his "fate-changing visit" to Pakistan for signing the CPEC agreement by saying, "I feel as if I am going to visit the home of my brother," [ 36 ] and claimed that the friendship between the two nations was "higher than mountains, deeper than oceans, and sweeter than honey. The government estimates that inefficiencies stemming from Pakistan's largely dilapidated transportation network cause a loss of 3. The train, loaded with tonnes of commodities, left Kunming for the port city of Guangzhou , where the cargo was transferred to ships for transport to Karachi , thereby opening the new route.
