ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan is handing management control of a strategic but commercially troubled deep-sea port to a Chinese company, the information minister confirmed Thursday.
The minister, Qamar Zaman Kaira, said that control of the port at Gwadar, near Pakistan’s border with Iran, would pass from the Port of Singapore Authority to a company he identified as China Overseas Port Holdings, in a move that had been anticipated for some time.
Mr. Kaira said the Chinese company would inject money into the Gwadar port, which has failed to meet the lofty goals set by the military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf on its completion in late 2006 and now lies largely unused
“We hope that the Chinese company will invest to make the port operational,” Mr. Kaira said, according to Reuters.
A spokesman for the Singaporean company declined to comment, as did the Chinese government. However, at a news briefing in Beijing on Thursday, a Foreign Ministry spokesman noted that China would “actively support anything that is beneficial to the China-Pakistan friendship.”
The fate of Gwadar, once billed as Pakistan’s answer to the bustling port city of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, has been a focus of speculation about China’s military and economic ambitions in South Asia for the past decade. Some American strategists have described it as the westernmost link in the “string of pearls,” a line of China-friendly ports stretching from mainland China to the Persian Gulf, that could ultimately ease expansion by the Chinese Navy in the region. Gwadar is close to the Strait of Hormuz, an important oil-shipping lane.

via Chinese Firm Will Run Strategic Pakistani Port at Gwadar – NYTimes.com.