DM Monitoring
BEIJING: Since the establishment of diplomatic ties 70 years ago, no matter how the world and domestic politics have evolved, China and Pakistan have always understood, respected, trusted, and helped each other.
This was stated by Prof. Tang Mengsheng, Director of Center for Pakistan Studies at Peking University, in an interview. The friendship between our two countries, which has always been rock-solid and vigorous, is exemplary among state-to-state relations. In the past 70 years, China-Pakistan friendship has always taken firm and strong steps, step by step more steadily. That is what we often say, China-Pakistan friendship is unbreakable,” Tang said. After he graduated from Urdu Major, Department of Eastern Languages and Cultures, Peking University in 1974, Prof. Tang Mengsheng participated in the construction of the Karakoram Highway, also called “Pak-China Friendship Highway” in Pakistan, as a translator.
As Tang recalled, the highway builders riding in open-backed trucks left from Xinjiang Province, China. On the road full of potholes, their trip was extremely hard. But to their great relief, upon their arrival, they were warmly greeted by long-waiting local people.
Despite the tough living conditions, the local people always took good care of them. Back in those days, they lived in areas near Hunza and Gilgit, where the roads were built along the mountains with little farmland nearby. In order “neither to interrupt local people’s daily lives, nor to bring harm to interests of local people”, the construction team’s food supply was brought from China.
