China's affection for Pakistan has limitations too.

Once again China stepped forward to bail Pakistan out. It underscored its time-tested friendship by providing a near interest free loan worth $2.3 billion to Pakistan for its balance-of-payments support, well ahead of the grueling, demand-loaded deal with the IMF.

To underscore the 'all-weather partnership', General Zhang Youxia, Deputy Chairman of China's Military Commission, received Pakistan's Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa in Tianjing for exclusive bilateral consultations.

But continued political theatrics, selfish power games and an absence of sincere commitment among Pakistan's key stakeholder appear to have partially shaken the Chinese trust.

The latest 'snub' was the exclusion from the 'High-level Dialogue on Global Development' held recently on the sidelines of the BRICS summit. Pakistan was conspicuous by its absence in a dialogue to which leaders of a number of developing emerging economies had been invited.

Even though the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs explained the reasons behind Pakistan's exclusion, the extremely dubious circumstances around the vote of no-confidence against former prime minister Imran Khan gradually tipped the balance, and the Chinese apparently discerned a gap in walk and talk, with the apparent inclination to the US and its allies.

But driven by a culture of consideration and empathy for friends, Beijing once again reached out to Pakistan in view of its precarious foreign exchange situation, and eventually green-signalled the funds through a consortium of three banks.

This also demonstrated that unlike the West, which tends to use IMF as a strategic warfare tool, China deals with friends like Pakistan with compassion and not vengeance for geopolitical bargains. IMF programmes are primarily a tool to subjugate economies, kill investment and growth and thus proliferate economic despair - so do the Chinese believe. And they see what has happened in Pakistan.

Below I would like to list down some bitter messages out of China - an extrapolation of discussions with some influential thinkers/officials in Beijing and Shanghai.

First, Pakistan remains an all-weather friend for China but that friendship has its limitations too. China desires political stability in Pakistan that is the prerequisite for economic development. But how can Pakistan achieve economic growth in a vindictive, divisive climate of protests and long marches? This is a point addressed to all key stakeholders who have been using...