Between 2020 and 2024, China supplied 81% of Pakistan’s total arms imports, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute — up from 74% in the preceding five-year period and 69% in the period before that. The trajectory is not a fluctuation. It is a consolidation.
In the same 2020-2024 period, Pakistan absorbed 63% of China’s total global arms exports, making Islamabad by far Beijing’s single largest customer. SIPRI senior researcher Siemon Wezeman described China as effectively Pakistan’s “only real ally” in military matters.
The Hangor deal, at $5 billion, the largest single transaction within that relationship, does not create this dependency. It cements and extends it into a new strategic domain that Pakistan cannot easily exit.
When a navy runs on Chinese parts, the foreign ministry cannot afford to disagree with Beijing. That is not a diplomatic observation. It is a structural one. Pakistan’s ability to engage the United States on security cooperation, to negotiate with Gulf partners on energy arrangements that may not align with Chinese interests, or to position itself within regional dialogues where China has competing objectives is not formally limited by the Hangor deal.
But it is practically conditioned by it. A foreign minister whose country depends on a single power for the operational readiness of its principal naval assets negotiates from a position of structural weakness, regardless of what the talking points say.
Pakistan’s consolidation around Chinese arms has been driven by identifiable pressures. Western suppliers, primarily the United States, imposed significant restrictions on defence sales to Pakistan following its 1998 nuclear tests and have attached end-use monitoring requirements and deployment restrictions to subsequent cooperation.
Those conditions are reasonable from the supplier’s perspective and politically difficult for Pakistan’s procurement establishment. China resolved that friction by removing the conditions. But the resolution came at the cost of an alternative dependency that is considerably more comprehensive, because it is structural rather than contractual, and because it now encompasses every major branch of Pakistan’s conventional military capability.
The Hangor deal represents a qualitative deepening of that condition. Previous arms purchases — the JF-17 fighter, Type 054A/P frigates, armoured vehicles, air defence systems — created significant dependency across the army, air force, and surface navy.
A submarine programme requiring Chinese components for every major maintenance event, Chinese technical supervision at Karachi Shipyard during local assembly, and Chinese cooperation for every software update and engine certification extends that dependency into the one domain Pakistan had not yet fully surrendered: its underwater deterrent.
The submarine arm of any navy is its most sensitive and strategically consequential asset. The Hangors place the operational readiness of that asset in Chinese hands for the lifespan of the programme.
China has not publicly leveraged its arms relationship to direct specific Pakistani foreign policy decisions. It has not needed to. Pakistan’s diplomatic establishment understands where its material dependencies lie, and that understanding shapes the range of options it considers viable before positions are formally stated. The constraint operates through anticipation, not ultimatum. Pakistan does not need to be told what China prefers on a given issue. It knows, and it factors that knowledge into its calculations before those calculations produce a policy.
What Pakistan has built, across three decades of steadily deepening procurement dependency, is a foreign policy operating within boundaries set by its arms supplier. The Hangor deal does not change that dynamic.
It makes it permanent in the one area — undersea warfare — where independence from single-supplier constraint matters most. Every maintenance cycle, every software update, every certification of the CHD620 engine’s operational readiness will reproduce the same negotiating asymmetry that defines the broader relationship. Pakistan’s diplomats will be managing their country’s interests across the Arabian Sea, the Gulf, and the wider region with Beijing holding the maintenance logbook for the fleet on which their navy’s deterrence depends.
