When Chinese President Xi Jinping landed in Islamabad in April 2015 and announced $46 billion in investment under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, Pakistani newspapers ran headlines and defined it as a game-changer. The dawn of a new era. Every television anchor had a new map of the subcontinent with a thick line running from Xinjiang to Gwadar, and in Balochistan, land that had been worth nothing suddenly had a price tag.

Eleven years later, 38 CPEC projects worth more than $25 billion have been completed. Power plants have been built, roads have been laid, and a port that once received fewer than 20 ships in an entire year processed 11,000 containers in a single month in April 2026. But the gap between what was promised and what has materialized, and who has paid the price, is a story that deserves telling

The Land Rush and the Fishing Community

In 2016 and 2017, as news of CPEC’s ambitions spread across Pakistan, something happened in and around Gwadar that the official narrative never even mentioned. Land prices in the district shot up overnight. Investors, speculators, and what can only be called organized land mafias descended on a city whose residents had lived on the same coastline for generations, largely unregistered, and therefore without legal protection.

The mechanics were simple. The very offices that existed to protect land ownership, the revenue departments of Gwadar, became the instrument of its theft. Officials tampered with original ownership documents, transferring plots that families had held for decades to outside investors. The settlement department was reportedly operating this as a business: for a fee, records could be altered. Locals who had farmed, fished, or simply lived on land for decades suddenly found themselves without legal standing to claim it.

For those who received offers they could not legally refuse, the prices seemed enormous in the moment; land that had been worth almost nothing in a remote coastal town was suddenly being purchased at prices that seemed too good. Many sold, thinking they had made the transaction of a lifetime, but within a year or two, those same plots were being resold at multiples. An estimated 290,000 acres were identified for acquisition to make way for CPEC-related development. Residents who refused to sell could have their land seized by the federal government, with forced resettlement the likely outcome. For locals whose families had lived in the inner city for generations, the promise of a gleaming new port city looked less like development and more like displacement with a Chinese name on it.

The fishing community, roughly 65 percent of Gwadar’s population, faced a separate assault on their livelihoods. Construction of the six-lane East Bay Driveway blocked 4.3 kilometers of access to the coastline, limiting fishing boats. In 2021, Pakistan granted fishing licenses to Chinese trawlers capable of large-scale deep-sea fishing. The locals’ traditional fishing grounds were being opened to vessels that could industrially harvest what the small-boat fishermen of Gwadar had sustained themselves on for centuries. When protests like Haq Do Tehreek (the Give Gwadar Its Rights Movement) erupted, the Pakistan Maritime Security Agency detained five Chinese trawlers, but the licenses were never revoked, and the trawlers returned.

The Power Story: The Nation That Forgot to Power Its Own Port

Pakistan in 2015 was facing 12 to 18 hours of load shedding per day across most of its territory. CPEC’s 14 power generation projects with a combined capacity of 9,504 MW were presented as the solution. Between 2015 and 2019, nine power plants were built. Load shedding fell, and this should be credited as such. But the design of how those power plants were built planted the seeds of the crisis that followed. CPEC energy projects were negotiated under Independent Power Producer (IPP) contracts that required the government to pay capacity charges on 85 percent of each plant’s total capacity, whether or not electricity was actually generated. Earlier IPP........

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