“To tell you the truth, I don’t know much about this situation,” Imran Khan bizarrely replied to the reporter from Turkey’s state broadcaster TRT World, even though his country shares a border with the Xinjiang Province. Instead of unequivocally condemning the ethnic cleansing of a million-plus Muslims in China, the Pakistani prime minister instead decided to praise China for the billions of Beijing dollars pouring into Pakistan as part of the “Belt and Road”.

XREF: Connects to broader patterns of BRI-dependent states avoiding criticism of China's human rights record, and to analyses of authoritarian soft power via economic leverage.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of Belt and Road Initiative leverage and Pakistan-China economic dependence.

Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Gl…, loc. 175