Every few weeks, Pakistan's Minister for Planning, Ahsan Iqbal, and the Prime Minister step off a plane in Beijing and recite the same well-worn tribute to Pakistan-China friendship: an ocean deeper, a mountain higher, honey sweeter. It is a lovely piece of poetry. It is also, at this point, a substitute for policy. Because in nearly a decade of shuttling between Islamabad and Beijing, the one lesson our leadership has conspicuously failed to bring home is the actual lesson of China's own turnaround not the metaphor, the mechanism.

China took what was, within living memory, one of its most volatile internal regions; the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, long associated with insurgency, separatism, and religious extremism and re-engineered it through relentless, disciplined economic reform: energy corridors, industrial parks, resource-tax restructuring, mass employment schemes, and a work ethic so demanding it became a national talking point. Whatever one thinks of the human costs of that model and there are serious, well-documented human-rights critiques of it, the economic architecture behind it was coherent. Infrastructure was tied to production. Production was tied to jobs. Jobs were tied to a deliberate, almost punishing culture of output, one Beijing has credited with helping choke off the very unrest the region was once known for.

This was, in its way, a genuinely smart move on China's part, whatever its costs. Beijing did not just build roads through Xinjiang and hope stability followed. It pulled the region's workforce, including the very demographic most vulnerable to radicalization, into factories, textile bases, and industrial parks run on a punishing "996" tempo, long hours, six days a week, output measured relentlessly against targets. Idle time is recruiting time for insurgency; Beijing simply removed the idle time. Whatever one's verdict on the coercion involved, the strategic logic was coherent: an occupied, exhausted, wage-earning workforce has neither the time nor the appetite for insurgency that an idle, resentful, unemployed one does. That is the actual mechanism behind China's much-advertised turnaround, and it is the one lesson our own delegations never bothered to bring home.

Our Planning Commission watched this up close, for years, as the principal Pakistani interlocutor for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. And what did it import? Highways. Ports. Power plants. What it never imported was the discipline; the idea........

© The Friday Times