Although Chinese President Xi Jinping is bound for Pakistan next week to tackle the $46-billion Pakistan-China Economic Corridor, the money to fund the project would not come from the newly established Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

A senior diplomat said on Friday that the project would neither tap Silk Road money but instead use funds from both nations.

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The corridor would connect the Gwadar Port in the Pakistan deepwater part of the Arabian Sea to the Xinjiang region of China, located in the Asian giant's far-west. It would use a planned network of streets, railways and energy projects.

By bypassing the Straits of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia - a known bottleneck as well as blockage risk during wartime - energy shipments bound for China would have a shorter route. In turn, the shorter travel would benefit the Pakistani economy, said Liu Jianchao, Chinese assistant foreign minister.

Liu adds, "Several different facets will be utilized for the financing of these projects. Both sides will increase cooperation, to jointly provide financing support," quotes Daily Times. He said the corridor is at the planning stages, so it could not tap the Silk Road or AIIB funds.

He acknowledged that the corridor would require substantial amount of money, but said Beijing is willing to financially support Pakistan.

With multi-billion dollar projects between Beijing and Islamabad over the year covering a wide variety of undertakings from road networks to energy ventures, political observers describe their diplomatic ties as an "all-weather friendship."

Andrew Small, a China expert at the German Marshall Fund and book author, commented, "This is a vastly ambitious effort to reshape the strategic economic geography of Eurasia and beyond," quotes a blog by Keith Johnson in Foreignpolicy. Small wrote the book "The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics."

Besides the China-Pakistan corridor, the blog disclosed that the two countries would soon finalize the sale of $5 billion worth of Chinese submarines to Pakistan. There are speculations among defense analysts that part of sub sale would be an upgrade of Gwadar which would convert it into a logistics hub for China's naval vessels.

TagsPakistan, AIIB, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, Silk Road