A direct gateway to the Indian Ocean has for long been a dream of Beijing. Ready access to the third-largest ocean that stretches from Africa in the west to Australia in the east is desirable, ostensibly, to boost trade by cutting cost and time.
Direct entry to the Arabian Sea would mitigate the need to go through the South China Sea, the Malacca Strait and traverse through the Indian Ocean to reach the Middle East and Africa. Such an opening would be staggeringly advantageous in a strategic sense. Geographically, China is impossibly positioned to make it happen.
But Pakistan, Beijing's all-weather friend, is facilitating the Chinese dream. Islamabad has increasingly turned to Beijing to prop up its weak economy and modernize its crumbling infrastructure by bonding over the shared enmity over their common neighbor, India. Pakistan has enthusiastically signed up for Xi Jinping's flagship project, the Belt and Road Initiative.
