The IAEA council agreed to provide supervision guarantees to India after the US and India lobbied widely for the same in 2008. Forty-five members of the NSG reached agreement to lift restrictions on nuclear export to India later in the same year, after which the India-US cooperation entered a crucial stage. The US has reportedly sold nuclear material to India ever since, while Russia is helping India build more than 10 reactors.

Since it initiated large-scale nuclear cooperation with the US and Russia, it is groundless for India to complain about similar cooperation - on a much smaller scale - between Pakistan and China. It is India and the US that has opened the so-called nuclear Pandora's box.

Their cooperation has, in some degree, removed obstacles for the Sino-Pakistan pact. Anybody nodding to the US and India has no reason to dissent to China and Pakistan now. The international community should abandon its ideological prejudice towards China and Pakistan.

Some Westerners think the civil nuclear cooperation between India and the US will certainly help improve the lives of ordinary Indian citizens simply because of their shared identity as free democratic countries.

In contrast, the deal between China and Pakistan, so-called non-democracies, must be evil and threatening, they aver. These double standards are a typical legacy of the Cold War era power politics. Any conclusion drawn from such a mentality deserves second thought.

China is firmly against nuclear proliferation and nuclear arms race. Together with the US, China had condemned the nuclear tests conducted by both India and Pakistan in 1998 and voted to support sanctions on both countries in the United Nations Security Council.

Furthermore, China also approved the sanctions resolution against Iran this year. The nation's steadfast determination to nuclear non-proliferation does not necessarily mean it will yield to pressure from other countries at the cost of its own national interests.

Setting aside the attitudes of other nations, China, as a responsible player in the world, will further its civil nuclear cooperation with Pakistan, according to existing international mechanisms and in the furtherance of its core national interests.

The author is an assistant researcher at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.