Pakistan Views

A Shanghai shipyard has completed the first of four frigates for delivery to Pakistan, the China Daily reported on Saturday, in the first such order from China by the Pakistani Navy. The deal is a “catalyst” for co-operation on construction of other vessels, the paper said, citing Pakistan Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Muhammad Afzal Tahir. He will attend a launch ceremony for the F-22P frigate in Shanghai on Monday. The fourth and last vessel will be completed at Karachi shipyard in 2013, to fulfil a pledge to transfer Chinese shipbuilding technology that was part of the April 2005 agreement to build the frigates.”They will be deployed for the defence of our maritime interests and to meet our commitments in other aspects of maritime diplomacy,” the paper quoted Admiral Tahir as saying.It noted that Pakistan had previously procured such military hardware from Western countries, including Britain and France. The F-22P is a modification of a Chinese frigate that uses a Russian-designed main gun rather than a Chinese model. It will be armed with eight surface-to-air missiles and eight surface-to-surface missiles, according to an entry in the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. Admiral Tahir met China’s Minister of Defence and the navy chief during his visit to Beijing this week.Last March, China’s navy participated, for the first time, in a multilateral naval exercise near Karachi, that also included the US, British, Turkish and French navies. Pakistan will host a similar exercise next March, the PN chief said.
China is developing its shipbuilding industry to rival yards in South Korea and Taiwan. This month, a Shanghai shipyard delivered the country’s first-ever liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier, four months behind schedule.