PNS Hangor Is Finally Here. What China’s Submarine Changes for Pakistan Forever

We broke this story first. And we want to tell you why it matters.

When our reporters confirmed that President Asif Ali Zardari would attend the commissioning of PNS Hangor during his five-day China visit, the initial reaction from some quarters was that this was a routine defense story. A procurement milestone. Something for the naval correspondents to handle and move on from. We disagreed then and we disagree now. What happened in Sanya on Tuesday is one of the most consequential moments in Pakistan’s defense and diplomatic history in a generation, and we think you deserve to understand exactly why.

Zardari did not come to this sun-drenched corner of Hainan Island for the weather or the hospitality. He came because a submarine was waiting. One that Pakistan ordered a decade ago, watched get built from a distance, and has needed for longer than anyone in Islamabad would comfortably admit. Standing on the southern tip of Hainan Island with the South China Sea stretching out behind him, he watched PNS Hangor get formally commissioned into his navy. We were tracking this visit from the moment he landed in Changsha on Saturday. This is what we found.

This deal goes back ten years. April 2015. Xi Jinping is in Islamabad. The two governments announce an agreement for eight submarines, four to be built in China and four to be assembled right here at home in Karachi. Total cost somewhere between four and five billion dollars. At that point in history it was the largest arms export contract China had ever signed with any country on earth. Not close. The largest. The original plan called for the first boats to be delivered between 2022 and 2023. That did not happen. Programs like this rarely run on schedule and this one was no exception. The first submarine did not hit the water in Wuhan until April 2024. Three more followed across 2025. All four completed sea trials. And now the first one has formally joined the Pakistan Navy.

We have spoken to enough people inside the naval establishment over the years to know what the name Hangor means to them. There is a pride attached to it that does not need to be performed. The original Hangor was a French-built submarine that on the night of December 9, 1971 found an Indian frigate called INS Khukri in the Arabian Sea and sank it. It remains to this day the only submarine kill in the entire history of the subcontinent. Pakistan did not name this new class after that vessel out of sentiment. Names in the military carry instructions. Every sailor who steps aboard one of these boats is meant to understand what they were built for. Not ceremonies. Not flag-waving. If the moment ever comes, these submarines exist to make any adversary think very carefully before concluding that the Arabian Sea is open water that belongs to everyone equally.

The boats themselves are formidable machines. Each one runs 76 meters long and displaces around 2,800 tons submerged. They can stay on patrol for up to 65 days without surfacing. The air-independent propulsion system means they do not need to rise near the surface to run their engines the way older submarines do. That makes them extremely difficult to detect. In submarine warfare, not being found is not a tactical advantage. It is the entire point.

On weapons, nobody is saying anything officially and we did not expect them to. Pakistan’s public line is that the Hangor class carries advanced weapons capable of striking targets at standoff ranges. What our sources and the broader defense community read into that language is six torpedo tubes and almost certainly a future configuration for the Babur-3, a submarine-launched cruise missile that Pakistan tested from an underwater platform back in 2017, estimated range around 450 kilometers, described by Pakistani officials as nuclear-capable. Formal confirmation of that integration has not come. But Pakistan’s existing submarine fleet already carries an assumed nuclear deterrence role. Nobody we have spoken to seriously doubts where this is heading.

Now look at the numbers because they tell the real story of what this relationship has become.

Between 2020 and 2024, Pakistan purchased more than 60 percent of China’s total weapons exports according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Not one category of weapons. All of them across the board. That figure stopped being a commercial statistic a long time ago. It is an alliance statistic. It describes a level of shared hardware, shared training, shared logistics and shared military doctrine that takes years to build and does not unravel over a single diplomatic disagreement.

On the economic side we have been covering CPEC since its earliest days and the scale of what China has committed here still demands to be stated plainly. More than 65 billion dollars in roads, power plants, railways and infrastructure, anchored at the port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea. Beijing prizes Gwadar in ways that go beyond what the official statements ever fully capture. It represents a potential route to the Indian Ocean that does not run through the Strait of Malacca, which is where China’s energy supply lines are most exposed to disruption. A Pakistan Navy operating eight modern submarines along those sea lanes changes the strategic mathematics of that corridor in ways that no amount of diplomatic language can replicate.

Something else came through clearly in our reporting on this visit. Beijing has been genuine and consistent in expressing its deep appreciation for what Pakistan’s security forces are doing in the fight against terrorism across the region. Chinese leadership understands, and has said so directly, that Pakistan is bearing a real and heavy burden on the front lines of counterterrorism. That burden protects not just Pakistan. It protects the people and the investments running through the entire corridor. That kind of recognition matters enormously in Islamabad. It is what separates a genuine partnership from a transactional arrangement.

Pakistan meanwhile is working through a seven-billion-dollar IMF program that has steadied an economy that went through some genuinely punishing years. The recovery is real. The trajectory is moving in the right direction. And through all of it China has stayed in the relationship not as a distant creditor watching from the sidelines but as a partner that has kept its commitments and kept showing up.

The four remaining submarines will be built at the Karachi Shipyard and Engineering Works under a technology transfer agreement with full fleet delivery expected by 2028. We want to be clear about why that matters beyond the hardware. Pakistan is not simply receiving submarines. It is absorbing the knowledge of how to build them. That engineering expertise, embedded now in Pakistani shipyards and in Pakistani engineers, will outlast this program by decades.

Here is where we land after following this story from the beginning.

PNS Hangor is easy to categorize as a defense procurement milestone and file away. We are telling you it is not that. Pakistan now has, or is within days of having, a submarine force with the range and endurance and potential firepower to fundamentally reshape the balance of the Arabian Sea. China built that capability. China financed the corridor that surrounds and depends on it. And the relationship that made all of it possible traces back to a single agreement signed when Xi Jinping visited Islamabad in 2015.

That is not a transaction. That is an architecture. Built on shared interest, sustained through genuine mutual respect, tested across a decade of political and economic turbulence, and still standing. On Tuesday in Sanya, one more piece of it slid quietly beneath the water.

We will keep watching.