Pakistan needed roads, power plants, transmission lines and a basic re-set of economic religion. The corridor scored higher than a good number of critics score in that test. The larger project has been justified as an outlay of more than 60 billion of investment in China as well as the utterances of the Pakistani officials have already credited CPEC with around 25.4 billion of direct investment and about 236,000 of new job creation. The most obvious is the introduction of 9,504 megawatts of CPEC energy projects to the grid which have taken the load shedding load that had equally crippled the homes and industry.

However, this time round the onus of realization falls on Pakistan that it needs to treat CPEC as a construction catalogue and not as an economic strategy 2026. This is what CPEC 2.0 is all about. Both, Islamabad and Beijing have already shown that the corridor is experiencing a new dimension, that is based on industrial cooperation, innovation, green development, and fine quality growth rather than project volume. This change is evident in the official common statements of 2024 and 2026 as both the sides are in favour of an upgraded CPEC with emphasis on expansion, innovation, green development, and openness. The change is also suitable to the opening of the 15th Five Year Plan of China, in which the high-quality development, the growth of the digital economy and the future improvement of technology........

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