In the Shadow of the Silk Road: Border Regimes and Economic Corridor Development through an Unremarkable Pakistan-China Border Market

Moments after reaching Afiyatabad—a bazaar along the Karakoram Highway in north Pakistan, a short distance from the border with China—I heard my name called. I turned to see a smartly dressed, middleaged man, a mop of white hair poking out from under a cap. "Hasan bhai!" he exclaimed again, the suffix signaling familiarity, "How are you?" It took a moment to register Rehmat Baig, whom I had first met in 1997 in Karimabad, the tourist hub in Pakistan's Hunza Valley. At the time, Baig had been working as a clerk in the port city of Karachi, and was home for holidays. The following year, 1998, I ran into him again during a stopover in Karimabad. Baig had now quit his job in the megacity, and was the proud proprietor of a tastefully decorated rooftop restaurant overlooking the terraced fields and jagged Karakoram skyline of central Hunza. The tourist industry was healthy, he had posited then, and I can recall his joy at returning home, leaving the urban stress of Karachi behind. That had been the last I saw Rehmat Baig, until this chance encounter in 2016, nearly two decades later.¹

"Baig sahib," I replied after a moment's pause. "What are you doing here?" Rehmat Baig looked surprised. "Well," he said matter-of-factly, "I am in Afiyatabad now," as if relocation to this border locale needed no further explanation. Pointing to a small shop across the road, he informed me that he had opened a café. "Drop by sometime," he said cheerily. What was unstated—but obvious—was his reason for relocation: the expectation of commercial success in the wake of the recently announced China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), with its projections of more than $50 billion in Chinese investments between the Arabian Sea port of Gwadar in Baluchistan, and the Pakistan-China border at Khunjerab (4695m), just seventy-five kilometers beyond where we stood.

Rehmat Baig's latest venture was an illustration of how people along the border region were investing their personal capital in the wake of economic corridor development. These small, personal investments were reflected in the growing number of shops and restaurants, hotels and hostels in the bazaar around us. In this article, I attempt to answer two simple questions: First, why—and how—did this bazaar appear along a previously uninhabited stretch of the Karakoram? And second, to what extent has the state-driven discourse around the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, promising wide-ranging benefits nationally, addressed local aspirations and transformed bordering?

I approach bazaars not only as places of exchange, but as reflective of political economy, social history, and daily life. While bazaars are often in flux—and even more so the border markets that contour to the vagaries of multiple regulatory mechanisms, tariff regimes, boom-and-bust cycles, and geopolitical pressures—intersections make bazaars both rich places to think with, and places from which to engage popular narratives.

In Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns (1961), Clifford Geertz famously described bazaars as places of localized and personalized exchange. Geertz's approach to the "bazaar economy" had been influenced by modernization theory. Indeed, in his early work on the bazaar economy—he would return to the topic the subsequent decade—he had followed a Rostowian model of linear economic growth whereby "traditional" economies needed to transition to a pivotal "industrial revolution" or "take-off" stage before they reached economic "maturity."² For Geertz, the Indonesian bazaar, from which he had drawn empirical evidence for Peddlers and Princes, contrasted with impersonal and dynamic markets, such as those found in Canada, China, Britain, Germany, Russia, and the United States at the time (according to Walt Whitman Rostow, such countries had already transitioned through the take-off stage³).

A half-century later, Geertz remains relevant not because of how he set up the dichotomy between bazaar and market, but in highlighting questions of development. As I describe, questions of what gets traded, by whom, and who benefits are...