It is a scorching hot June day in Gwadar, a port city on the southwestern coast of Balochistan, and more than a dozen eight-year-old children have blocked a road by lying across it. Dressed in traditional shalwar kameez, the kids are protesting against a severe water shortage and long hours without electricity. The traffic is stopped for a while but then the children get up, rub the dust off their clothes and run towards the crowded markets.

Balochistan, where I grew up and now work as a journalist, is the largest province of Pakistan by area, but the least populated. Sharing borders with Iran and Afghanistan, it is also the country’s least developed province: three out of four people live below poverty line. But Balochistan at the centre of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the Pakistani component of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which comprises $60bn worth of infrastructure projects. For Pakistan, this is an enormous investment — equal to 20 per cent of the whole country’s GDP — and the government has claimed it will bring wealth and development to Balochistan and change the fortunes of its people. But the protests by children in Gwadar show that it is not universally popular.

The corridor comprises energy and infrastructure projects, industrial development and the Gwadar port. The port is the linchpin. It is located near the Strait of Hormuz, the passage between the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman, through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes. As the principal goal of the corridor is to connect China’s Xinjiang province with the Arabian Sea, no Gwadar port means no CPEC.