China's super highway to Pakistan

The BBC has an article about a project with dubious intent:

China's President Xi Jinping is on a two-day visit to Pakistan, where he is expected to announce investment of nearly fifty billion dollars. The focus of spending is on building a China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a network of roads, railway and pipelines between the long-time allies.
They will run nearly two thousand miles) from Gwadar in Pakistan to China's western Xinjiang region. The projects will give China direct access to the Indian Ocean and beyond. This marks a major advance in China's plans to boost its economic influence in Central and South Asia, correspondents say, and far exceeds US spending in Pakistan.
"Pakistan, for China, is now of pivotal importance. This has to succeed and be seen to succeed," Reuters quoted Mushahid Hussain Sayed, chairman of the Pakistani parliament's defence committee, as saying. Pakistan, for its part, hopes the investment will boost its struggling economy and help end chronic power shortages. 

Analysis by Ilyas Khan of BBC News in Islamabad, Pakistan:

Is Pakistan on the verge of becoming the Asian Tiger that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said it would become when he was last in power in 1997?
China plans to inject some fifty billion dollars, just a little less than three times the entire foreign direct investment Pakistan has received since 2008. Many say Sharif's penchant for "thinking big" and China's increasing need to control maritime trade routes may well combine to pull off an economic miracle in Pakistan over the next four years, when Pakistani officials say most of the projects being finalized today will be well under way.
But there are questions over Pakistan's ability to absorb this investment, given its chronic problems with militancy, separatism, political volatility, and official corruption.
China is worried about violence from ethnic Uighurs in its mostly Muslim north-western Xinjiang region, and fears hardline separatists could team up with Uighur Islamic militants fighting alongside members of Pakistan's Taliban.
In Pakistan, a decade-old separatist insurgency in Balochistan province, where the economic corridor starts, makes that area extremely volatile. Many observers believe however that the incentive of an economic miracle may make Islamabad work a bit harder to stabilize the situation.

Xi will spend two days holding talks with his counterpart Mamnoon Hussain, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and other ministers. He will address parliament during his visit.
Deals worth some thirty billion dollars are ready to be signed during the visit, with the rest to follow.
Under the CPEC plan, China's government and banks will lend to Chinese companies, so they can invest in projects as commercial ventures.
A network of roads, railways and energy developments will eventually stretch some two thousand miles). Some fifteen billion dollars worth of coal, wind, solar, and hydro energy projects will come online by 2017 and add ten thousand megawatts of energy to Pakistan's national grid, according to officials. An optical fiber cable between the two countries is also due to be built.
Pakistan, meanwhile, hopes the investment will enable it to transform itself into a regional economic hub. Ahsan Iqbal, the Pakistani minister overseeing the plan, told the AFP news agency that these were "very substantial and tangible projects which will have a significant transformative effect on Pakistan's economy".
Xi is also expected to discuss security issues with Sharif, including China's concerns that Muslim separatists from Xinjiang are linking up with Pakistani militants. "China and Pakistan need to align security concerns more closely to strengthen security co-operation," he said in a statement to Pakistani media. "Our co-operation in the security and economic fields reinforce each other, and they must be advanced simultaneously."

Rico says it's a dicey project in a dicey part of the world... (And don't you think that India might be a little concerned about making it easier for the Chinese to invade again?)