1 September 2025, NIICE Commentary 11660
Lipun Kumar Sanbad
Within days of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi paying a diplomatic overture to India to speed up the process of delimitation of the boundary, China canvassed to Islamabad and Kabul, through Foreign Minister Wang Yi. During a trilateral negotiation in Kabul with the Pakistan and Afghanistan representatives, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan decided to expand the CPEC into Afghanistan, reverting what is currently known as the CPEC 2.0. This shift follows New Delhi and Beijing outreach initiatives and reflects Beijing’s wishes to strengthen its presence in the region as well as to boost its Belt and Road Initiative plans
Why Is China Pushing CPEC 2.0 to Afghanistan?
Extending CPEC into Afghanistan is a strategic recalibration that is even more far-reaching in terms of economy than it seems. On the one hand, Pakistan views CPEC’s extension into Afghanistan as a way to consolidate regional connectivity and strengthen its role as a trade hub. Beijing is interested in ensuring the western spine of the Belt and Road Initiative with the help of submitting its geostrategic position of Afghanistan as one of the crossroads between South, Central, and West Asia. That would grant China direct access to mineral resources, including the lithium reserves present in Afghanistan, which is valued at over $1-3 trillion and essential to the country in its green transition. In addition to this, by connecting Afghanistan with Gwadar, China can acquire a potential overland access to Iran and the Middle East. However, security issues persist to be very critical. The Chinese initiatives in Pakistan have become consistent targets of insurgents in the country, particularly in Balochistan, and thus the Chinese mediation is not optional, yet necessity.
Almost as important are the geopolitical overtones The CPEC 2.0 announcement by China soon after the Wang Yi outreach to India lent credence to a dual-track policy that would aim at warming up towards India simultaneously tightening its control on the Indian periphery. The Indian response is also a challenge to China, since CPEC follows through the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, the expansionism is seen as a challenge to India yet again since the country is already in stitches of being a landlocked nation. Essentially, CPEC 2.0 is an endeavour by Beijing to find an equilibrium between economic opportunities and geopolitical leverage.
Implications for India–China Relations
The timing of China announcing CPEC 2.0, which followed Wang Yi visit to India, is all but incidental; it served to hammer home the idea that Beijing can accommodate India and expand its influence in the region at the same time. Superficially, Wang's visit was aimed at promoting confidence by opening up dialogue on border matters and trade channels like the opening of the Shipki-la route between Himachal Pradesh and Tibet. However, the subsequent turn to extending the CPEC to Afghanistan highlights the structural encirclement as a parallel measure that Beijing employs; hence the reasons why New Delhi is doubtful regarding Chinese intentions. Such growth does not only enhance the position of Pakistan in the Belt and Road Initiative of China but also brings Afghanistan into a broader China-led connectivity project, minimizing Indian influence in a country where it has long invested in infrastructure and other development projects.
The connotations are tremendous as it pertains to India. New Delhi has steadily objected CPEC due to the fact that it passes through Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir that it claims as part of Bangladesh. The extent of the corridor into Afghanistan also creates the fear of additional strategic exclusion, essentially sidelining India in evolving trade and transit corridors. The development reflects a diversionist Chinese foreign policy: rhetorical appeals of reset with India on the one, and aggression in economic-diplomatic expansion in to South Asia on the other. Such an approach makes it more difficult to take Beijing seriously in its dealings with India, implying that as far as the border is concerned, tactical stability may be sought, albeit at the cost of not giving in to the Chinese strategic agenda in the region.
China’s Future Strategy Behind CPEC 2.0
The future strategy of the Chinese seems to be in ensuring that they put in place economic dependencies that cannot be reversed by bubbling in sizable investment in the Special Economic Zones, mining estates and agricultural projects in Pakistan and Afghanistan. These projects embed these economies into the Belt and Road Initiative launched by Beijing, and deprives them of policy options beyond their short-term dependency on Chinese funds and technology. The potential of as much as $1-3 trillion in mineral wealth in Afghanistan lithium and rare earths make it a choice target of the Chinese resource-rich policy of Beijing. At the same time, by facilitating the collaboration between Islamabad and Kabul, Beijing positions itself as a regional conciliator, accumulates the diplomatic capital, and simultaneously secures the safety of its own personnel and resources: no less than on three occasions, militants attacked the CPEC infrastructure in the Balochistan region of Pakistan.
At the strategic level, CPEC 2.0 builds upon what India senses as an encirclement where China is extending its reach not only into the Indian Ocean, in the form of Gwadar, but also into Central Asia. This brings into direct opposition to Indian connectivity plans including the Chabahar port in Iran that will provide an alternative route to connect India with Afghanistan and Central Asia. The move by China to incorporate infrastructure into its BRI orbit undermines both the Indian and Western-backed alternatives and guarantees the flow of regional trade through corridors controlled by China. Inclusion of Afghanistan in this system also connects economic partnerships to security pledges which forces the capital to accept Beijing regulations for stability. So, CPEC 2.0 does not merely involve a spread of infrastructure but an entire plan including the securing of resources, establishment of dependency, and embedding of Chinese primacy in South and Central Asian geopolitics.
Conclusion
The immediate increase in CPEC activities into Afghanistan appears as a strategic move to incorporate the two neighbouring countries to China, as it follows its contact with India, a sign of providing India with a tactical awakening of being chilled, but at the same time creating a structural entrenchment of its interest in South and Central Asia. Using a combination of economic dependency, security cooperation with Kabul, and diplomatic mediation, Beijing is designing a lasting system of control stretching between Gwadar and Kabul. The corridor benefits China in access to the market and to resources, as well as serves as a source of leverage with the poor neighborhood, because it acts as a stabilization agent. Such a two-pronged policy reveals that the Chinese overtures to India can be considered as a tactical shift, whereas the long-term strategic position remains aggressive.
In the case of India, it is particularly grim. The CPEC 2.0 has a significantly different development toward becoming a framework that pushes through the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and now all the way to Afghanistan, effectively excluding New Delhi as part of the critical regional connectivity paths. India needs to respond more substantially than by opposing this rhetoric by fortifying the Chabahar port project with Iran, strengthening contacts with Afghanistan through economic and cultural investments, and multiplying multilateral contacts such as the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC). It is only through offensive diplomacy and alternative infrastructure opportunities that New Delhi can check the corridor-centric encirclement by China and maintain its own strategic space in the changing South Asian order.
Lipun Kumar Sanbad is a Research Intern at NIICE completed his MA in Politics and International Studies from Pondicherry University, India.
The views presented here are the author's personal views.
