By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: President Asif Ali Zardari pledged on Sunday to deepen defence ties with China, touring the headquarters of the country’s top aerospace firm in a landmark visit that highlighted their strategic alliance amid fragile peace with India.
Zardari’s trip to the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), Beijing’s leading producer of military and civilian aircraft, was the first by any foreign head of state, his office said.
The visit came 128 days after a US-brokered ceasefire ended a four-day clash between Pakistan and India, triggered by a terrorist attack in the disputed Pahalgam area of occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
Accompanied by his son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the Pakistan Peoples Party chairman; his daughter Aseefa Bhutto Zardari, the first lady; Senator Saleem Mandviwalla; Pakistan’s ambassador to China Khalil Hashmi; and China’s ambassador to Pakistan Jiang Zaidong, Zardari toured the entire facility.
He was briefed on AVIC’s key projects, including the J-10 fighter jet, the co-produced JF-17 Thunder fighter, progress on the J-20 stealth fifth-generation aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, automated production lines, and command-and-control systems for multi-domain operations.
The J-10C variant “played a crucial role” in the May Maraka-e-Haq and Operation Bunyan-um-Marsoos operations against Indian aggression. Pakistan claimed victory, saying its air force, using Chinese J-10C jets, shot down six Indian fighters including three French Rafales. India confirmed losses but gave no details on numbers.
Zardari said the J-10 and JF-17 had “greatly strengthened” Pakistan’s air force, a fact “clearly demonstrated” in the standoff.
He hailed AVIC as “a symbol of China’s technological advancement and of the enduring strategic partnership between Pakistan and China”.
Zardari reaffirmed that the two nations would “continue to expand collaboration in defence production and aviation, further deepening their all-weather strategic cooperative partnership”.
China, which has not fought a major war in over four decades, has poured resources into military modernisation under President Xi Jinping. Over the past five years, China supplied 81 percent of Pakistan’s imported weapons, including fighter jets, missiles, radars and air-defence systems, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Some systems have been co-developed or built in Pakistan with Chinese technology.
Zardari arrived in Chengdu on Friday for a 10-day visit, following Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s trip last week that sealed $8.5 billion in investment deals.
Later Sunday, Zardari took a high-speed train from Chengdu to Mianyang, covering 139 kilometres in about 30 minutes.
Briefed on the train’s operations, safety and environmental features, he praised China’s “achievements in sustainable and resilient transport, including pollution-free electric propulsion and earthquake early-warning technologies”, calling them “a marvel of railway engineering”.
He said the innovations offered “valuable lessons for other countries including Pakistan”.
China operates the world’s largest high-speed rail network, with over 45,000 kilometres of track carrying more than two billion passengers a year at speeds up to 350 kilometres per hour, linking nearly all major cities.
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