‘Iron brothers’: How China and Pakistan built an unlikely 75-year bond

From secret nuclear exchanges to a key diplomatic deal, Pakistan and China have long helped each other. What’s next? Islamabad, Pakistan – Nations and empires have fought each other over territory for centuries. In March 1963, Pakistan did something rare: It offered land five times the size of Hong Kong to another country, China. Under a boundary agreement with Beijing, Pakistan transferred control of the Shaksgam Valley, roughly 5,180 square kilometres (2,000 square miles) in the Karakoram range, territory India considers part of disputed Kashmir. There was a strategic logic to that deal. Pakistan did not possess uncontested sovereignty over the area, and the dispute remains unresolved today. But China had defeated India in their 1962 border war just three months earlier. Pakistan’s leadership concluded that Chinese control over the contested mountains made more sense than trying to fend off Indian claims itself. On May 21, as Pakistan and China celebrate 75 years of their diplomatic relationship, that episode more than six decades ago stands as an early pointer to the rare trust – glued together in good part by shared enmity with India – that has bound two unlikely partners: An avowedly communist and atheist nation, and a country born on the basis of religion. Earlier this week, Pakistani parliamentarians gathered as Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar addressed a Chinese parliamentary delegation seated in the Senate’s visitors’ gallery. Dar spoke of a “converging vision”, of symbols of friendship “spread across Pakistan’s geography”, and of a relationship that had grown “from strength to strength”. The Senate subsequently adopted a unanimous resolution titled “Re-affirming China-Pakistan Friendship and Brotherhood” to mark 75 years of diplomatic ties between the two countries. And on May 23, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif will fly to Beijing for a four-day state visit, accompanied by senior government and military officials. In joint statements, communiques and public addresses marking the anniversary, both governments are expected to reach for the same vocabulary they have used for decades. Iron brothers. All-weather friendship. Higher than mountains, deeper than oceans. What the celebrations will not capture, however, is the full story of the relationship between the neighbours. That story includes the transfer of contested territory to China; a nuclear bargain neither side has officially acknowledged; and a diplomatic opening Pakistan helped broker in 1971, for which it received little formal credit. Today, the relationship appears both more transactional and durable than the official narrative suggests, say analysts. “What has actually held it together is structural complementarity, not affinity,” Maria Adele Carrai, an associate professor at the University of Oxford, told Al Jazeera. “The 75-year story is more the story of two states finding each other useful, again and again, under changing conditions.” Born of a shared enemy In February 1942, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father, met Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist leader of wartime China, in Delhi. Chiang reportedly got on well with Jawaharlal Nehru, who would go on to become independent India’s first prime minister. He was considerably less impressed by the All-India Muslim League leader, recording in his diary that Jinnah was “dishonest” and that “the British make use of people like this.” As historian Rana Mitter documents in Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945, his account of China’s role in the Second World War, Chiang had little patience for separatist politics. Nine years later, however, the country Jinnah founded formally recognised the communist state that had displaced Chiang’s republic on the mainland. Pakistan became the first Muslim-majority country, and among the first non-communist states, to recognise Beijing in January 1950, less than six months after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The move is often portrayed as bold and progressive. In reality, it was rooted in strategic necessity. Pakistan needed a counterweight to India before it had fully consolidated itself as a state following independence from British rule in August 1947. Geography and threat perceptions mattered more than ideology. Islamabad formally joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954 and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in 1955, United States-led alliances designed to contain communist expansion in Asia and the Middle East, even as its diplomats quietly cultivated ties with Beijing. Feroz Hassan Khan, a former brigadier in the Pakistani army and now a scholar at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, traces the logic of the relationship to those early years. “The relationship with China was always the long game,” Khan said. “Pakistan understood it could not afford strategic animosity with its neighbours. The West was distant, powerful and pragmatic, but not a neighb