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KARACHI: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif is scheduled to meet China’s Premier Li Qiang and the Minister of Information Technology and Industry Li Licheng today, Thursday, as he continues his six-day visit during which he will hold a string of meetings with Chinese political and business leaders.

Sharif started his visit to China over the weekend, where he attended a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and held talks with Chinese leadership, including President Xi Jinping.

He also witnessed a major Victory Day military parade in Tiananmen Square — China’s largest in years — held to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.

The display featured cutting-edge systems, including hypersonic missiles, sea drones and laser air defenses. The event was widely viewed as a show of Chinese military might, with a number of world leaders, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, in attendance.

“Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif will meet with His Excellency Premier Li Qiang of China today,” his office said in a statement while circulating his agenda for the day. “The Prime Minister will also hold talks with His Excellency Li Lie-cheng, China’s Minister of Information Technology and Industry.”

Pakistan considers China a major investor and regional ally.

Over the years, Beijing has emerged as Islamabad’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade exceeding $25 billion in recent years, and Chinese companies have already invested heavily in power, transport, infrastructure and telecom projects across the country as part of the multi-billion-dollar China–Pakistan Economic Corridor project.

Sharif will also preside over the second edition of the Pakistan–China Business-to-Business Investment Conference in Beijing during the day. The meeting will review outcomes from the first conference held in Shenzhen in June 2024 and set a future roadmap.

A day earlier, Sharif also invited top Chinese business executives and companies to expand their investments in Pakistan, citing his government’s investor-friendly policies and the country’s push for sustainable economic growth.

KILLA ABDULLAH, Pakistan: On a sweltering August morning earlier this month, 30-year-old Bibi Hajjira pulled a scarf tightly around her head, slipped on gloves, and covered her face with an embroidered mask before setting out from her small village in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province. 

Perched on the back of a motorbike driven by her husband, their two-year-old son wedged between them, she began the 40-kilometer ride across rocky tracks and water-cut ditches toward the District Emergency Operations Center in Killa Abdullah, one of Pakistan’s most high-risk polio districts, with chronic vaccine refusals, logistical challenges, and proximity to cross-border virus transmission from Afghanistan.

Hajjira has her job cut out for her: to convince reluctant mothers to let their children swallow two drops of the oral polio vaccine — a mission that makes her both a lifeline for the community and vulnerable to resistance, and sometimes even attacks, in one of Pakistan’s most polio-affected districts.”

“This work is very challenging because we have to move from village to village and house to house despite extreme heat and sunlight,” Hajjira told Arab News. 

“It is a challenging task to convince the resisting families of polio drops, like trying to convert a non-Muslim to Islam.”

Pakistan launched its fourth nationwide polio vaccination drive of the year on Sept. 1, aiming to immunize 28.7 million children under five by Sept. 9. Officials say the country has reported 24 cases so far in 2025, compared with 74 in all of last year, suggesting progress even as challenges remain.

Indeed, despite three decades of eradication efforts, Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan remain the only two countries in the world where poliovirus is still endemic, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The South Asian nation had reduced cases to just one in 2021, but vaccine refusals, poor routine immunization and security challenges have repeatedly allowed the virus to resurface.

The WHO last year also warned of “fake finger marking,” where vaccinators mark children’s fingers without actually giving drops, hampering eradication efforts.

Attacks on vaccination teams have further undermined progress. Since 2012, militants have killed nearly 100 polio workers and security personnel guarding them, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, viewing the campaign as a Western plot. 

Just this year, several police officers protecting vaccination teams were killed in ambushes in the northwest.

WOMEN ON THE FRONTLINES

Hajjira is one of around 225,000 women mobilized in Pakistan during recent nationwide campaigns, according to the National Emergency Operations Center (NEOC). 

Officials say women make up nearly 60 percent of vaccinators in Balochistan, where cultural and religious norms often restrict male outsiders from entering private homes. In many conservative households, only women can interact freely with mothers and children, making female vaccinators not just important but essential to the program’s success. Without them, entire pockets of the province would remain inaccessible to immunization teams, officials say.

Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest but least developed province, is also among the hardest to reach: vast distances, rugged terrain, and porous borders with Afghanistan complicate campaigns. Resistance to polio drops is often rooted in illiteracy, poverty and mistrust of government initiatives, leaving female health workers on the frontlines of both persuasion and delivery.

“The female polio workers have been providing good support, especially in some hard areas of the province,” said Inam ul Haque, provincial coordinator for the Emergency Operation Center in Balochistan. 

“They have access to go inside the houses and rooms to find and vaccinate children with polio drops.”

Gains have been made.

Last year, 27 of Pakistan’s human cases of polio came from Balochistan, but the province has reported none so far in 2025. 

Out of 162 samples collected from 23 sites this year, only 77 tested positive, reducing the positivity rate to 48 percent. Additionally, the number of affected districts had dropped from 24 to 19.

The most encouraging development came in July 2025: only one out of 23 samples tested positive, bringing monthly positivity down to just 4 percent, a strong indicator that containment measures and intensified immunization efforts are taking effect.

But Haque said “the threat of the polio virus still looms over us.”

And the struggle to convince families remains fraught. 

“Many parents here resist vaccination due to lack of education,” Hajjira said. “Some women even say, ‘Our husbands have sworn that if we give polio drops to the children, they will divorce us’.”

Yet she keeps going. 

“This is a struggle, and no work succeeds without struggle, if even one child is vaccinated because of our efforts, it is a great success for us,” she said with a smile.

Her husband, Naimatullah, admitted he initially resisted his wife’s work because of the stigma around the vaccine. 

“I have personally seen cases in our village where polio-affected children are now grown up with lifetime disabilities ... that convinced me and now I see this as an act of goodness,” he said. 

Local residents say female vaccinators have changed attitudes in a district long marked by refusals. 

“Women in remote parts of Killa Abdullah district were outright refusing polio vaccine for their children but since female polio workers started convincing them, now they are aware of the benefits,” said Muhammad Rahim, a villager from Killi Hajji Baqi.

Hajjira said she had managed to vaccinate nearly 800 “hidden children,” those whose parents initially refused. Now, she hopes more women can join this line of work. 

“It is very hard to find women in Killa Abdullah who are willing or allowed by their families to join this profession,” Hajjira said. 

“We endure negative attitudes, even insults and humiliation, but I keep persuading the families, hoping that once their thinking changes, the attitudes will also be changed.”