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AT the height of the Roman Empire, all roads led to, and from, Rome. In Britannia alone — a province conquered in 43 AD and held for 400 years — the Roman legions built about 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometres) of roads. The historian Plutarch records that these roads ran “perfectly straight through the countryside”. Remnants of them exist even today.
Our own Grand Trunk Road (1,600 miles or 2,500km long) was begun by Sher Shah Suri who ruled for only seven years, from 1538-1545. It connected the ends of an empire, from Chittagong to Kabul.
In 1962, Pakistan and China collaborated on the 810-mile (1,300km) Karakoram Highway. It bored through solid, savage mountains to connect Xinjiang with Punjab and KP plus Gilgit-Baltistan. It took 17 years to complete. It followed one route of the ancient Silk Road. Its commercial utility has overtaken its strategic value, for it was designed to accommodate two Chinese tanks riding abreast.
More recently, Pakistan has embarked on an ambitious programme involving a network of “multiple-lane, high-speed, controlled-access highways which are owned, maintained, and operated federally by the National Highway Authority. At present, 2,567km of motorways are operational, while an additional 1,191km are under construction”. One segment will link the northern Khunjerab Pass with Gwadar port in southern Balochistan.
Xi Jinping has avowedly imperial inclinations.
They are part of the One Belt One Road Initiative (OBOR), the brainchild of Chinese President Xi Jinping. He has avowedly imperial inclinations. As a recent biographer Michael Sheridan writes in The Red Emperor (2024), “Xi Jinping may be the ruler of a modern country, but he is a man whose mind is very, very old”.
It is this pride in China’s ancestry that drives Xi to rejuvenate China. Western analysts have drawn an analogy — termed the ‘Thucydides Trap’ — between the rise of a modern China (a latter-day nouveau riche, upstart Athens) and the established might of the US (Sparta, then the leading Greek state). In this, inherent rivalry predicates that war is not only possible; it is inevitable.
The Chinese view it differently. To them, “the long arc of history stretched back across dim centuries when the emperors were masters of the biggest economy and the grandest nation on earth. The period when the new United States bestrode the world stage […] was a mere intake of breath in cosmic Chinese terms.”
Xi Jinping knows that China, despite its inordinate investment in weaponry ($223 billion in 2023) will never be able to compete militarily with the US (comparably $850bn). Instead, it has taken a different, elliptical approach. Through the OBOR, China has expanded its presence across the globe, “making inroads into open economies, creating synergies of influence and local clout”.
The aim of OBOR is to defeat the US and its allies through a subtler form of Sino-satyagraha or non-violent resistance. Despite the West’s false alarms, China does not intend to retrieve Taiwan by force. It will deliver such “a kinetic shock to the US […] that its willpower would crumble, its alliances would unravel, and its retreat would be inevitable”.
Xi’s greatest ally in America’s fall is not Russian President Vladimir Putin but US President Donald Trump. He should have read Henry Kissinger’s prediction that if China ever got strong, it would be impossible to deal with.
Xi, like every autocrat however democratically elected, needs to look over his shoulders at what his critics are thinking, if not saying. One of them — Hu Deping, the son of Hu Yaobang (a high-ranking post-Mao reformist) — warned against “the illicit combination of money and power, special interest groups of privilege that can run roughshod over the interests of the people”.
Trump and his unbridled companion Elon Musk may not read Chinese. This English translation should suffice as a warning to them, and others.
In 2011, president Barack Obama sent his vice-president Joe Biden to Beijing. During a confidential tête-à-tête with Biden, Xi revealed his vision. He wanted “to make China great again, restore the party to the centre of power, return the economy to state control, expand the military, and take ambitious steps onto the world stage”.
Xi Jinping has been granted tenure until death. He is only 71 years old. Deng Xiaoping died aged 92; Mao Zedong aged 82. Gerontocracy is on Xi’s side. (Incidentally, Xi has been granted the title Rénmín Lǐngxiù or People’s Leader. Only Mao before him received that singular honour.)
What does this mean for Pakistan, a country whose time span parallels both China’s ancient 5,000-year chronology and its post-1940s modernity? Pakistan suffered a Caesarean birth. It has had a troubled adolescence and an unsettled nationhood. Will it ever enjoy the placed joys of a rocking-chair old age? Only 22nd-century Pakistanis will know.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, March 27th, 2025
