As China’s economy and international prominence continues to grow, Beijing is now, more than ever, developing its inner and Western provinces, including Xinjiang. Its interests in Xinjiang extend to the greater South and Central Asian region as China continues to form diplomatic alliances and economic ties with its bordering neighbors. In particular, China’s move to the west and the recent designation of Kashgar as a Special Economic Zone has been an important factor for Beijing’s deepening relations with Pakistan, it’s gateway not only to South Asia but also to the greater Central Asian region. This paper will examine the steps China is taking to establish Xinjiang as a major trade and transport hub in the “New Central Asia,” and how the city of Kashgar is being developed to facilitate significant transnational trade and development with Pakistan. It will also examine China’s recent investments and development projects in Pakistan and how its neighbor in South Asia is now one of its most important allies in the region. It will posit that China’s thirst for energy resources, namely oil and natural gas from Central Asia and the Middle East, has prompted Beijing to place more emphasis on maintaining and deepening relations with Pakistan. Moreover, this paper will assess how Sino- Pakistani relations in the 21st are affecting China’s relations with India, especially in regards to Christopher Pehrson’s “String of Pearls” concept. This thesis will focus on two major case studies: the establishment of Kashgar as an SEZ and the development of the Gwadar Port in Southern Pakistan, and will show that in many regards, both projects are facing the same development problems.

This dissertation seeks to understand the ways in which Pakistani government’s attempts to initiate large-scale infrastructure development projects in Balochistan Province have transformed its social and political landscape. Ethnographically, the study focuses on Gwadar, a small coastal town in Pakistan’s western Balochistan Province to show how colonial and postcolonial projects of progress and development suppress or subsume other kinds of lived geographies and imaginations of place. Keeping in mind the centrality of everyday experiences in generating social forms, this dissertation describes how development, transnationalism, and ethnic identity are (re)configured. It is based on ethnographic encounters that foreground the lived experiences and imaginations of fishermen from Med kinship and occupational group who occupy a subaltern position within the local status hierarchy in Gwadar. On the one hand, the promise of becoming modern citizens of the future mega city incites new desires and longings among those fishermen that facilitate their incorporation into emergent regimes of labor and entrepreneurship. On the other hand, Pakistani security forces have tightened their control over the local population by establishing a cordon sanitaire around Gwadar Port and the town. These mechanisms of control have disrupted local fishermen`s experiences of place and intimate sociality and introduced elements of exclusion, fear, and paranoia. By interrupting the fishermen`s expectations of their rightful place in the city, it compels them to think of alternate ways to confront the state’s development agenda, including peaceful protest and armed struggle. The dissertation concludes, tentatively, that the imposition of political violence by state authorities that accompanies the structural violence of mega infrastructure projects tends to create a mirror effect whereby the victims of development adopt a language of violence and a different idiom of identity. / text