FIFTY years after China and India fought it out in the Himalayas, there is a misconception in Pakistan, and often shared abroad, that Islamabad and Beijing came close to each other as a result of the brief war between the two Asian giants in 1962.

It is true that the war hastened the process of détente between a China that was communist and a Pakistan that was deeply entrenched in the US-led system of military alliances. But the process of what would turn out to be a mutually fruitful relationship had begun at least seven years earlier when two Pakistani and Chinese statesmen met at Bandung in 1955.

The occasion was the first Afro-Asian summit conference sponsored by five nations, among them Pakistan, at the Indonesian city and attended by such giants as Zhou En-lai, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jawaharlal Nehru, U Nu, Ali Sastramidjojo and Dr Charles Malik. The man who represented Pakistan, its third prime minister, Mohammad Ali Bogra, was one of the five sponsors of the conference, and it was on the sidelines of this historic 29-nation conference that Zhou and Bogra developed an understanding that has continued to grow and mature to have profound consequences for South Asia.

As a battle-tested communist revolutionary who had taken part in Mao’s Long March, Zhou had no reasons to be chummy with the leader of a Pakistan that a year earlier had joined Western military pacts and was America’s most ‘allied ally’ at the height of the cold war. Those were also ‘Hindi-Chini bhai bhai’ days, making the colonial powers shudder at the thought of the world’s two most populous nations getting together despite the differences in their social and political systems. Yet it is a tribute to Bogra’s sagacity and diplomatic skills that he was able to remove Zhou’s reservations, for the Chinese prime minister returned home to tell party officials that Bogra had assured him that Pakistan’s membership of the Western military pacts wasn’t directed against China.

From the benefit of hindsight we can see that the spadework done by Bogra and Zhou paved the way for a relationship that was later to be expanded, strengthened and deepened by Suhrawardy, Ayub, Bhutto and Yahya. As time would pass, the China-Pakistan relationship would turn out to be a major factor in the Cold War’s Asian theatre. It is so even today.

About this time most people thought that the relationship with China essentially helped Pakistan and that its north-eastern neighbour had little to gain from strategic ties with a relatively small country. To test the validity or otherwise of this theory, one has to see China’s position, first, during the Cold War when the USSR and China were supposed to be a monolithic bloc, and, second, after the Sino-Soviet split, which increased China’s isolation. After the ideological break between the two communist powers, Pakistan became even more important for Beijing because Islamabad was of invaluable assistance in helping Beijing fight international isolation.

In fact, at the height of the joint quarantine made around China by the US and USSR, Chinese nationals found even normal air travel through the ‘free world’ difficult. Pakistan then broke new ground in world aviation when PIA became the first airline in the world to fly to China. For decades to come, China’s official airline would take the Islamabad-Karachi route to fly on to destinations beyond.

As an Indian analyst wrote, “the strategic relationship with Pakistan … enabled China to develop relations with the Muslim world and make friends with the USA” (Shri Prakash, Peace Initiatives, Vol III, 1999). Of historic significance for world politics – and Pakistan’s relations with both China and America – was Islamabad’s role in effecting a rapprochement between the two Pacific powers, for it was from Nathiagali, when Yahya Khan was in power, that Nixon’s Secretary of State Kissinger flew to Beijing in July 1971 to open a new phase in US-China relations.

NEUTRALITY: All this was the culmination of a process that began in 1950 when Pakistan was the first Muslim country to recognise China and maintain a neutral stance during the Cold War and the Korean conflict which followed. Keen to cash in on its jute and cotton surpluses, Pakistan didn’t adopt an anti-Chinese or anti-Pyongyang line at the United Nations and did not participate in the economic embargo, so keen it was to sell its golden and silver fibres to China and import coal, whose delivery India had blocked to paralyse Pakistan railways.

As China stabilised and began reviewing its borders, drawn by colonial powers, it was keen to sort the issue out first with India, with which it has a 4,000-km-long border. Even though New Delhi had recognised Beijing’s takeover of Tibet, relations chilled when India granted asylum to Dalai Lama, and Nehru adopted a hard line on settling the border issue. Ultimately, it was Nehru’s “push out the Chinese” order before leaving for Ceylon (Sri Lanka) that touched off the war that cost India so dearly.

Pakistan began its negotiations for a border agreement at least a year before the India-China war. The talks were confidential, and the deal was finally clinched on March 2, 1963. From then on, relations developed warmth and grew rapidly in all fields.

Pakistan also spearheaded the move for China’s admission to the UN, the Karakoram Highway was built and later turned into an all-weather road, China became a major supplier of weapons to Pakistan, and since then there has been collaboration in aircraft production and missile and nuclear technology.China’s growth as an economic superpower, its growing diplomatic and military clout, and the rapid expansion of its military power, especially naval, have not lessened the importance of its relations with Pakistan. Beijing feels concerned over Washington’s attempt to craft an anti-China alliance in the Pacific, its relations with Moscow remain mired in suspicion, and with New Delhi relations continue to remain frosty over the territorial dispute in India’s northeast.

Pakistan still remains perhaps China’s only strategic ally in the real sense of the term, as affirmed by an extraordinary clause in a treaty signed by the two countries in April 2005 when Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited Islamabad. The clause says “each Contracting Party shall not join any alliance or bloc which infringes upon the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of the other Contracting Party, nor shall it take any action of this nature, including the conclusion of treaties of this nature, with a third country.”

What should cause concern to Pakistan are the activities of anti-Chinese Uighur militants. The Pakistani Taliban have adopted an anti-Chinese policy, enjoy killing Chinese civilians and consider it jihad. While Pakistan has often succeeded in unearthing anti-Chinese cells and handed over some militants to Beijing, Islamabad must continue to be alert on this score.

There are Uighur militants in Afghanistan also where they arm and train with full knowledge of Afghan intelligence officials.

Islamabad must coordinate its policies with Kabul to root out the terrorists’ safe havens across the Durand Line.