What China wants from Pakistan

WHAT China wants from Pakistan is the same as what China wants from every other country, which is to endlessly run a trade surplus in their favour. There might be a few specific things beyond this, such as Gwadar for instance, but those are marginal and nowhere near as central to Chinese designs in Pakistan and the rest of the world as we might imagine. Just add up the numbers. Since 2010, Pakistan has run a cumulative trade deficit with China equal almost to $90 billion. This means capital worth $90bn has flowed from Pakistan to China against goods and services coming the other way. The next big deficit region includes the oil-producing countries of the Gulf. With the US, in the same period, Pakistan ran a trade surplus of $34bn. With the UK, it ran a trade surplus of almost $12bn. For the EU, it is harder to give a figure because the State Bank does not report EU trade data as a region, and the member countries have changed over the decade, making it difficult to manually compute the cumulative trade for these years. But it is safe to assume that there would be a sizeable trade surplus here too.