In Washington, D.C., China has a bad reputation for the way it treats its Muslim minorities. But views differ greatly in many majority-Muslim countries in Asia. Educational programs and exchanges are a key part of this. Pakistan is an exemplar: Estimates suggest that more than 28,000 students studied in China in 2019, making it the top destination for outward-bound students.
Pakistan’s ambassador to China, Khalil Hashmi, said in Beijing that Pakistan is one of the top three countries in terms of sending students China. In 2018, the most recent year that China’s Ministry of Education released statistics on the numbers of students from different countries, the top sender countries were South Korea (50,600 students), Thailand (28,608), Pakistan (28,032), India (23,198), and the U.S. (20,996).
China’s government offers scholarships that can be generous, but several families I spoke to told me they had financed their own or their children’s studies in China, especially for medical degrees. Based on interviews with 25 Pakistani students or parents of students, other popular programs that Chinese universities offer to Pakistani students include Chinese language, engineering, and computer science programs. Educational consulting companies act as brokers between potential students and Chinese universities. One such firm currently advertises an academic year of tuition fees for a medical degree and lodging for $3,000.
Aidah Baloch, a student from Balochistan province in southwestern Pakistan, was awarded a grant from the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) in 2022. “My scholarship is fully funded by the CSC,” she says. “It provides a monthly stipend of 3,500 renminbi [$500] for my Ph.D. and it covers all my expenses.”
CSC was established in 1996 by China’s Ministry of Education to encourage Chinese students to study abroad, and foreign scholars and students to study in China. It offers a wide range of scholarships. “CSC scholarship programs sponsoring undergraduates, postgraduates, general, and senior scholars can be partially or fully-funded,” says Baloch.
The number of scholarships available to Pakistani students has grown alongside the expansion of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), several Chinese and Pakistani officials told me. Often referred to in the press as a $62 billion project (while estimates from the Pakistani government value the project at $50 billion), CPEC is a major spoke of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s global trade and infrastructure project.
In an interview in Islamabad, China’s Ambassador to Pakistan Jiang Zaidong said his government is “willing to help Pakistan in the education sector,” noting that the Chinese Embassy as well as Pakistan’s federal and provincial governments offer scholarships for study in China.
Beijing also funds educational initiatives in Pakistan itself. The most famous of these are the Confucius Institute schools that teach Chinese language and culture. They are usually embedded within local universities, often becoming China studies departments of host schools. There are now five Confucius Institutes in Pakistan. According to the Pakistan-China Institute, an organization based in Lahore that describes itself as a “non-governmental, non-partisan, and non-political think-tank,” nearly 30,000 Pakistani students were studying Chinese language through these programs in 2022.
There are also other Chinese-government-funded courses at vocational training institutes. According to a paper published by the Pakistan Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences in 2023, “94 centers are being operated all over Pakistan to provide better opportunities for Chinese language learning in remote areas.” Other China studies centers have been established in universities in Pakistan as part of the “CPEC Consortium of Universities,” which was founded in August 2017 to promote collaboration between Chinese and Pakistani institutions of higher education. The consortium currently comprises 29 Chinese universities and institutes and 83 Pakistani schools. Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission and the China Association of Higher Education have also established the China-Pakistan Higher Education Research Institute, which is to be jointly managed by Islamabad’s National University of Sciences and Technology and Peking University.
Senior Chinese officials in Pakistan say they want to further increase scholarships and cultural exchanges between the two countries. The Chinese Consul General in Karachi, Pakistan’s most populous city, Yang Yundong, said that even though China already provides “lots of scholarships to Pakistani students, we want to increase the number of scholarships to Pakistani students in the future.”
Aidah Baloch, the student from Balochistan, says that she is happy to be in China for her higher education: “China is the first country that came to my mind when I was dreaming of doing a Ph.D.” She explained that the university she attended, Ocean University of China in Qingdao, is under the direct administration of the Chinese Ministry of Education, and is known for oceanography and fisheries science, which she studies. Like Qingdao, her hometown of Gwadar is also a coastal city, so she feels comfortable there.
“In Gwadar, whenever I visited the Gwadar port and saw Chinese people there, I thought one day I would be there in their country for my studies. My dream finally turned into a reality, and I am now in China, where people are hardworking, humble, and respectable.”
But not everyone in Pakistan dreams of a Chinese education
Local resentment about Chinese development projects in Pakistan has led to resentment and violence. These feelings are particularly strong in the impoverished southwestern province of Balochistan, the location of the port of Gwadar which China has been developing as a key logistics hub for CPEC. In April 2022, the Baloch Liberation Army claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing near the gate of the Confucius Institute at the University of Karachi which killed three Chinese teachers and a Pakistani driver. The attacker was later identified as 30-year-old Shaari Baloch, a science teacher and married mother of two who was studying for her Master’s degree at the university she bombed. In a letter claiming responsibility for the attack, a spokesperson for the Baloch Liberation Army, Jeeyand Baloch, said that “targeting [the] director and officials of Confucius Institute, the symbol of Chinese economic, cultural and political expansionism, was to give a clear message to China that its direct or indirect presence in Balochistan will not be tolerated.” At the time of the attack, the Karachi University Confucius Institute had more than 30 teachers from China and more than 7,000 Pakistani students.
Pakistani students studying in China do not always come back with fond memories of the country. In face-to-face interviews with education scholars Huma Akram, Muhammad Kamran, and Naseer Ahmad for a paper published by the Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences in 2020, Pakistani students in China reported “food problems, communication problems, weather adjustment, physical, and academic issues.” Another paper, also published in 2020, based on a survey of 203 students found that “Pakistani students are under acculturative stress,” with nearly 70 percent mentioning “perceived discrimination.”
The father of a student studying in China who asked to be quoted anonymously said he regretted sending his son to China, and that he should have enrolled him in a Pakistani university.
“We sing the mantra of friendship between the two countries, say that China and Pakistan are ‘iron-brothers,’ and that our friendship is ‘deeper than the ocean.’ But in reality, Chinese know very little about Pakistan, my son says.”
Several students and parents mentioned the repression of Muslims: The student’s father mentioned “Muslims being denied their rights in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China.” When Muslims in the West “are inhumanely treated or denied their due rights, we protest on the roads,” he told me. “But there has not been a protest for the Muslims of Xinjiang because the two countries have amicable relations.”
One student who requested anonymity said that there has been no news about abuses of Muslims in China in China’s press, and that Chinese people have told him that such news in Western media is “not true.” The Pakistani government has largely gone along with Beijing’s defense of its treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities: Islamabad has not issued any comments that mention the well-documented reports of human rights abuses, but has stated that it “believes in the principles of the UN Charter including respect for political independence, sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs of states,” and “supports China’s efforts for socio-economic development, harmony and peace and stability in Xinjiang.”
Muhammad, another father of a Pakistani student who asked to be referred to only by his first name, told me, “We, as a Pakistani nation, do not want to utter a single word to show solidarity with the persecuted Muslims of Xinjiang, because we are afraid and cannot afford to earn the ire of China.” On the other hand, he said sarcastically that the China-Pakistan friendship is “higher than the Himalayas, deeper than the ocean, and sweeter than honey.” He further added, “This is why it has kept us silent to the injustices of our fellow Muslims in China as it [our friendship] could fall overnight like a sand dune.”
Even Islamist political parties and other groups in Pakistan have been silent about the treatment of Uyghurs. Unlike many in the West, they have not condemned China’s abuses of Muslims in Xinjiang. One of the reasons is that they do not want to anger their country’s powerful military establishment, which has a strategic relationship with China.
Many Pakistani students seem happy to accept China as it is, or to not worry about it. Muhammad Habib spent more than three years studying in China, and is now teaching geology at the University of Balochistan. During an interview, he sipped green tea he had brought from China and said that the People’s Republic of China “is now one of my favorite countries.” He added: ”I have made friends there. . . I was given love and respect while studying in China.”
Aidah Baloch says, “Chinese culture is precious and different, and most importantly, they are hardworking. What I like the most is their hardworking spirits.”
The University of Balochistan’s Abdul Zahir Mengal believes that China’s cultural and soft power efforts are succeeding in Pakistan. For “students hailing from third world countries that lack basic amenities, if they are given scholarships and study, they start projecting the values of the countries where they have studied.”