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This is officially the Year of Pakistan-China Friendship, and in a four-day visit to Beijing last week — the third in just 17 months — Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, proclaimed that the two best friends “are like one nation and two countries.” Chinese officials were reported to have presented Mr. Gilani with 50 fighter jets as a welcome gift.

So it raised eyebrows when this week the two nations politely disagreed over whether Mr. Gilani had given the Chinese a gift that would be hard to mislay: an entire naval base, right at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

Pakistan’s defense minister, Ahmad Mukhtar, who accompanied Mr. Gilani on the state visit, announced the deal after Mr. Gilani returned home on Saturday.

“We have asked our Chinese brothers to please build a naval base at Gwadar,” a deepwater port on Pakistan’s southwest coast, he told journalists.

Moreover, he said, Pakistan had invited China to assume management of the port’s commercial operations, now run by a Singapore firm under a multidecade contract.

On Tuesday, however, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, disagreed, saying the port had neither been offered nor accepted.

“China and Pakistan are friendly neighbors,” she said at the ministry’s twice-weekly news conference. “Regarding the specific China-Pakistan cooperative project that you raised, I have not heard of it. It’s my understanding that during the visit last week this issue was not touched upon.”

Some analysts were at a loss to explain the discrepancy.

“Maybe there were some discussions between the two sides when Gilani was up in China last week, bearing on some kind of future Chinese stewardship of the port,” said Michael Kugelman, a South Asia scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, in a telephone interview. “Maybe there was some speculative discussion. Perhaps the Defense Ministry simply got its signals wrong.”

“We’re seeing a lot of incompetence in the Pakistani government these days,” he added.

Others, however, saw Mr. Mukhtar’s announcement as a pointed, if graceless, effort to send a message to the United States that Pakistan had other options should its foundering relationship with Washington prove beyond repair. Ties between the two nations, never very warm, have been icy since American commandos killed Osama bin Laden in a raid inside Pakistan that went undetected by the nation’s military and intelligence establishments.

Pakistan has an interest in sustaining ties with the United States, which has given the nation billions of dollars in economic and military aid in return for Islamabad’s help in combating terrorism.

But China has long been its closest major ally, with political, economic and military ties that extend to the founding of the People’s Republic of China more than 60 years ago.

China regards Pakistan as a strategic bulwark against its longstanding rival, India, and it needs Pakistan’s help to combat Islamic separatists in the Xinjiang region, which abuts Pakistan’s northern border.

Indeed, China contributed much of the millions of dollars that have been spent to build Gwadar, the only port in Pakistan big enough to handle the largest cargo ships.

Some analysts say China stands to gain from the rift between Pakistan and the United States. In an editorial this month, Global Times, a major Communist Party newspaper, took pains to praise Pakistan’s commitment to the fight against terrorism and to note that China had been an unswerving friend.

That was an unspoken gibe at the United States, which many Pakistanis fear will abandon them once the war in Afghanistan winds down.

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