After decades of cooperation, and more than a decade of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Pakistan should ask a question that is uncomfortable precisely because it is so obvious: why have we absorbed so much Chinese capital, infrastructure and technical assistance, but so little of the institutional discipline that made China's own development possible? This is not an argument that Pakistan should 'copy China'. It is an argument that we have concentrated on importing Chinese outputs roads, power plants, equipment and financing while paying remarkably little attention to the administrative systems that allowed China to coordinate land, cities, infrastructure, finance, industry and local government at scale.
The distinction is increasingly important because China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) itself is moving into a different phase. China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) records say China has materialised around $27 billion in investment across China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects, while the current China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) framework is being repositioned around growth, innovation, green development, livelihoods and regional connectivity. The 2025-29 China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) action plan is explicitly intended to deepen cooperation beyond the original infrastructure-heavy phase.
At the 88th China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) Progress Review, participants noted that if China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) 2.0 remains principally a pipeline of projects, Pakistan will have missed the most valuable part of the Chinese experience. Evidence from China today makes the contrast hard to ignore. By the end of 2025, China's permanent urban population had reached 953.8 million and its urbanisation rate had risen to 67.89%.
China also added 12.67 million urban jobs during 2025, while its high-tech manufacturing value added increased by 9.4%. These numbers do not prove that every aspect of Chinese development is desirable or transferable; they show something Pakistan has consistently underestimated: development at scale requires an administrative state capable of continuously adjusting institutions as the economy changes. The 2023 census officially puts Pakistan's urban population at roughly 39%, but a World Bank study released in October 2025 argues that conventional administrative definitions significantly understate the extent of urbanisation.
Using satellite imagery and the internationally comparable Degree of Urbanisation methodology, the study revisits what actually constitutes a town or city in Pakistan. If settlements that function economically as urban areas are classified administratively as rural, government planning underestimates demand for roads, water, sanitation, housing, public transport, schools and employment. Pakistan may therefore be more urban than its official statistics suggest, while being institutionally far less prepared for urbanisation than its statistics imply.
The consequences are visible in almost every major city. Pakistan continues to manage metropolitan economies through overlapping jurisdictions, development authorities, municipal bodies, cantonments, provincial departments and specialised agencies. The Asian Development Bank's current mapping of Pakistan's local-government landscape identifies 129 district councils and 619 urban councils, alongside metropolitan corporations, municipal corporations, committees and other local structures.
Revenue-raising powers vary substantially according to provincial legislation. In Karachi, the World Bank has previously identified fragmented city management and weak coordination among institutions as fundamental obstacles to planning and investment. The problem is therefore not simply that Pakistani planners are using outdated maps.
The deeper problem is that the institution responsible for planning the economic city often does not coincide with the geography of the economic city. This is where China's experience becomes useful not as a template, but as a source of institutional lessons. China's urban-development thinking has moved considerably beyond the simplistic proposition that urbanisation.
Its current development strategy emphasises coordinated regional development, urban-rural integration, green transition, infrastructure connectivity and higher-quality urbanisation. The latest Chinese data show that regional economic strategies such as the Yangtze River Economic Belt, Yangtze River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei cluster remain central to national development planning. The underlying lesson is straightforward: cities are economic systems, not merely administrative territories.
Pakistan still tends to treat urban development as a construction exercise. A flyover is approved, a road is widened, a housing scheme is notified, a mass-transit corridor is built and a drainage project appears after the flooding. What is usually missing is the metropolitan economic model behind these investments.
Where will employment be concentrated? How will workers commute? What land uses should surround transport nodes?
Who will finance maintenance twenty years from now? How will land values change when public infrastructure arrives? Which institution is accountable when the road, sewerage system and housing expansion cross different administrative boundaries?