Axis of Pretence

When Beijing and Islamabad lecture the world on bullying, the joke is not lost on Asia.

China and Pakistan have discovered a new cause in jointly opposing “hegemonism,” “bullying behaviours” and the formation of “small circles.” Their joint communiqué, issued after the seventh round of their foreign ministers’ strategic dialogue in Beijing, was a sermon on multilateral virtue aimed squarely at India and its partners in the Quad. It was also a masterclass in geopolitical hypocrisy.

Both sides reaffirmed their devotion to the UN Charter, free trade and sovereign equality, while denouncing bloc politics and violations of national sovereignty. The target was unmistakable: India’s expanding partnerships with Japan and Australia, and Washington’s open endorsement of India as a stabilising force in the Indian Ocean Region.

China’s moralising would be comical were it not so consequential. Few countries have done more to normalise coercion in Asia. From the South China Sea, where Vietnam and the Philippines face relentless pressure, to the Himalayas, where Bhutan’s claims are quietly eroded, China’s diplomacy often arrives backed by coastguard cutters, economic leverage or “salami-sliced” military facts on the ground. Even its trade policy has acquired a punitive edge, deployed to discipline smaller states that displease Beijing.

Pakistan, long the region’s most reliable exporter of instability, was no less brazen in its contribution to the lecture. Such bravado rings hollow from a state whose security doctrine has for decades rested on nurturing jihadist proxies, from the mountains of Kashmir to the massacre at Pahalgam, and then denying responsibility with ritualised indignation.

Pakistan’s refusal to abandon terror as an instrument of statecraft, or to explain why a country perpetually pleading victimhood abroad continues to depend on militancy at home and patrons abroad for relevance, shapes the communiqué’s most revealing passages.

Even as Beijing and Islamabad rail against “small circles,” they are busily assembling their own. The newly advertised trilaterals with Afghanistan and the China-Bangladesh-Pakistan framework echo a strategy that dates back to the Cold War, when China first embraced Pakistan as a useful southern flank against India after the 1962 war. Since then, exclusion has been policy, not accident. Regional architectures that sideline New Delhi have long appealed to a partnership built less on shared values than on a shared interest in hemming in Indian power. Bloc politics, it seems, are objectionable only when others practise them. When conducted under Chinese auspices, exclusion is rebranded as “regional cooperation.”

The double standard grows starker on terrorism. The two sides urged the world to avoid “selective approaches” and condemned “double standards,” even as China went one better on the hypocrisy scale by lavishing praise on Pakistan’s “significant contributions and huge sacrifices” in combating terrorism.

For years Beijing has shielded Islamabad at the United Nations, placing technical holds on the designation of Pakistan-based militants and treating terrorism less as a regional scourge than as a diplomatic inconvenience so long as its immediate interests are not threatened.

China’s engagement with Afghanistan has been narrowly instrumental: containing unrest in Xinjiang, preventing spillover into its western provinces and safeguarding prospective investments. Neither approach has been animated by any serious commitment to a rules-based regional order. Yet both now speak the language of accountability as though it were newly discovered.

The subtext of the communiqué is strategic insecurity. China bristles at a Quad that complicates its maritime ambitions and legitimises balancing behaviour across the Indo-Pacific. Pakistan, accustomed to defining itself in opposition to India, resents a neighbour whose partnerships amplify its influence far beyond South Asia and steadily erode Islamabad’s claim to strategic relevance. Together, they cloak their unease in the rhetoric of multilateralism, hoping to recast voluntary alignment as aggression and defensive cooperation as conspiracy.

India’s partnerships, by contrast, are neither coerced nor clandestine. They are transparent, issue-based and welcomed by countries that have learned, often the hard way, the costs of Chinese assertiveness and Pakistani adventurism. Beijing and Islamabad will continue to describe their relationship as “ironclad” and to set ever-new goals for their “all-weather” partnership. In Asia’s crowded theatre, hypocrisy is common. But rarely has it been so meticulously rehearsed or so conspicuously on display.