Disguised in the uniforms of paramilitary police, gunmen checked the id cards of the passengers of a Karachi-bound bus before slaughtering all those they considered not native to the western Pakistani province of Balochistan. A total of 22 Pash-tuns were killed in the attack on an isolated road south of Balochistan's capital, Quetta, on May 29th. Responsibility was claimed by the United Baloch Army, part of a tangle of separatist groups in the province. The insurgency began a decade ago and is now the most violent and long-lasting of five rebellions that have broken out in Pakistan's largest, most thinly populated and least developed province since the country's independence from Britain in 1947. That makes Balochistan, one of the most troubled areas of Pakistan, a surprising location for what officials hope will become one of the world's great trade routes, linking the deepwater port of Gwadar with the city of Kashgar, a trading hub in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang (see map). During a visit to Pakistan in April by China's president, Xi Jinping, it was announced that China would invest $46 billion by 2030 in new roads, the upgrade of existing ones, power plants, pipelines and other projects to fulfil this dream-far more than America has invested in Pakistan in recent years.
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