A broadly-based diplomatic initiative always requires a series of balancing acts. One of these was seen this week when President Xi Jinping visited Pakistan.

India has recently loomed large in Chinese diplomacy with efforts to get Asia's other great population center on board for the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Maritime Silk Road project, as well as to ensure an absence of hostilities along their mutual border. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also due to pay a return visit to China next month. This being the case, China needed to ensure that its long-standing ally Pakistan, a country engaged in a permanently tense stand-off with India, did not feel neglected.

Although Pakistan's economy is only one-seventh the size of India's, it also has a role to play in China's grand regional infrastructure strategy. The principal topic of the China-Pakistan talks was the proposed transport link - a combination of road, rail and oil pipelines - between China's Xinjiang and the Pakistani port city of Gwadar. This, in the concept of China's "Belt and Road" initiatives, will serve as a short-cut between China and the Middle East, cutting out the need to send goods by sea around the southern tip of India. In fact, this route will manage to avoid transit through India altogether, which will please Pakistan but has already sparked a certain amount of resentment in India.

However, there is no good reason for such resentment. China's "Belt and Road" initiatives involve a multiplicity of links, routes and connections that are not in competition with each other and do not need to have negative effects on one another. Different goods require different means of transportation; why should the maritime route between China and the countries around the Indian Ocean not be complemented by a land link by the shortest possible route across the north of the subcontinent?

And the advantages accruing to Pakistan through this scheme involve no disadvantage to India, either economically or strategically. The biggest obstacle to Pakistan's economic development has for a long time been security. The country is beset by terrorism. The fight against terrorism is itself hampered by corruption and by the excessive influence of the armed forces, parts of which are compromised by sympathies for or actual involvement with extremist organizations. Pakistan has never been able to bring its armed forces firmly under the control of the central government, something that China has always recognized as a fundamental principle of national governance. No doubt President Xi - who had to postpone a visit to Pakistan in autumn 2014 due to security concerns - has been careful to emphasize this principle with his Pakistani interlocutors.

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