The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has been touted as the centrepiece of China's Belt and Road Initiative and the key to its strategic partnership with Pakistan. Notwithstanding claims about the CPEC's economic potential, however, Islamabad's economy continues to be dire. This article attempts to better understand the ramifications of Pakistan's economic viability and its consequences for China. It does so by examining China-Pakistan relations from the lens of Pakistan's civil-military relations, paying attention in particular to what the Pakistan Armed Forces (PMA)'s domestic dominance means for China's interests, including economic interests, in Pakistan. We suggest that PMA preponderance and its attendant influence on the country's economic performance bring another dimension to interpreting Sino-Pakistani relations. As Beijing's most trusted political partner in Pakistan, the PMA's local dominance has considerable benefits for China, particularly in the security and political aspects of its interests. However, this dominance also entails a number of complications for Chinese economic interests, a factor that has implications for the future of China's CPEC investments and their financial sustainability. KEYWORDS China; Pakistan; China-Pakistan relations; Pakistan Armed Forces; China-Pakistan economic Corridor; Chinese investments The extant literature has rightly demonstrated the salience of geo-strategic and security factors-in particular, shared concerns about India-in anchoring relations between China and Pakistan (see, for example, Small 2015; Garver 2001). Pakistan's adversarial relationship with India is well-known, an 'intractable rivalry' rooted in the contentious partition of 1947 and fuelled by a host of factors including religious and identity differences, terrorism and a bitter territorial dispute over Kashmir (Fair 2014). Many Pakistani elites, rightly or wrongly, see India as an 'existential threat' ('Pakistan obsessed,' 2019). These reasons principally inform why, for Islamabad, its relations with Beijing have always been its top strategic priority: China acts as its primary external balancer against India as well as security backer. Notably, China had provided considerable assistance to help Pakistan become a nuclear weapon state, and is today its main arms supplier (Boon 2018, 35). Beijing, for its part, perceives India as a security and strategic concern in its western periphery, especially after their 1962 border war. 1 This threat perception has persisted