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If you’ve been surfing social media for the past two days, you must have come across a Pakistani NIC that belonged to a Chinese man. Many had been claiming that this was the effect of CPEC and the Chinese influx in Pakistan.
People on social media had been arguing over the authenticity of Feng Lin Cui’s Pakistani national identity card. It was the opinion of many that the NIC was a fake photoshop effort, while others claimed that allotment of the new computerized NIC was a perk of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
After much debate, Pakistan’s interior minister Ahsan Iqbal came out with a statement that shed light on the reality behind this viral Chinese NIC. According to Ahsan Iqbal, the Chinese man Feng Lin Cui’s parents had been citizens of Pakistan since 1989 and Feng had got his national identity card even before CPEC was born.
The reason people on social media had been expressing their anger at the viral picture was that many had been claiming that every Chinese person involved in different projects of CPEC would be getting Pakistani nationality, which scared the living hell out of the already unemployed youth that lives here.
His parents were naturalised as Pakistani citizens in 1989, decades before CPEC was born.
— Ahsan Iqbal (@betterpakistan) November 1, 2017
However, Ahsan Iqbal’s clearance of the incident and the authenticity of Feng’s NIC has simmered things down. This just proves that the people of Pakistan are still unsure of what CPEC is all about and what it would bring for to the table.
The paranoia of a Chinese influx in Pakistan is well present but in a nutshell, a lot of the negative aspects are only present in the air, with them not having an influence on the reality of the $60 billion+ project that is being considered the backbone of Pakistan’s economy.
