A young Laotian woman driving the first high-speed train from Vientiane to Kunming is doing something far more radical than crossing a border. She’s crossing a social frontier her country never offered her before. For her, the Belt and Road Initiative isn’t a geopolitical morality play; it’s a ladder. And it’s remarkable how few people seem interested in noticing the rungs.
For more than a decade, the BRI has been framed almost entirely by Western commentators as a juggernaut of steel, money, and geopolitical ambition, an x-ray of China’s intentions rather than of partner countries’ needs. Critics tally ports, pipelines, power stations, parse ownership, and rehash the “debt trap” accusation as if it were a literary genre.
But focusing solely on the hardware is like reviewing a school by measuring its brickwork. The real story is what happens inside. And in the BRI’s case, the inside story is talent. The emergence of skilled workers, technicians, entrepreneurs, and managers across countries that had long been locked out of that future. You can dislike Chinese financing. You can question Beijing’s motives. What you cannot do, if you’re being honest, is ignore the human capital shift happening right under everyone’s nose.
More than 150 countries now engage with the BRI. Trade reached USD 3.07 trillion last year. Behind every contract is something no audit can quantify: a young man or woman learning a skill they never had access to. If infrastructure is the skeleton, people are the muscle, and Asia is bulking up.
Where The Worksite Becomes The Classroom
Spend time around BRI project sites and one notices something rarely mentioned in policy papers. They function as gigantic, open-air vocational schools. This is the part that gets left out of the “China builds, locals watch” narrative, because it punctures the caricature entirely.
In Laos, where subsistence farming is still the norm, a 414-kilometre electrified railway has become a conveyor belt for skills. Nearly 1,000 locals have trained at the Lao Railway Vocational and Technical College, which didn’t exist a decade ago. Without the railway, the idea of Laos producing its own drivers for a modern train system would have sounded almost absurd. Now it sounds inevitable.
Indonesia’s experience with the Jakarta–Bandung high-speed line makes the point even more clearly. The Indonesian Railway Polytechnic which was co-built around the project has trained more than 45,000 Indonesians. Most foreign-investment projects around the world do not produce anything resembling that scale of local technical uplift. Yet somehow, the narrative about the BRI remains stuck at “China builds, everyone else pays.”
The lesson is blindingly simple. Infrastructure creates opportunity only when governments build pathways for their own citizens to walk into it. Laos integrated the project with its logistics network, while Indonesia, mired in headline-friendly losses, did not. The contrast is not about Chinese cunning. It is about domestic governance. That this point still needs to be made says less about the BRI and more about the conversations surrounding it.
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If you want to understand the real BRI story, you need to stop counting ports and start counting promotions
A Region Rewiring Its Talent Base
Critics like to insist that the BRI is all scaffolding and no society. What they miss is the second-order effect. How infrastructure reshapes industries, and how industries reshape people. Think of it as the reverse of trickle-down economics, a structural push upward.
Across ASEAN, value-added exports soared 43 percent between the late 2010s and early 2020s. That doesn’t happen because someone built a road. It happens because a road connects to a factory, which connects to a training centre, which feeds into a supply chain that suddenly demands more skilled workers. Infrastructure doesn’t generate talent, but it generates demand for talent. And demand is what rewires an entire labour market.
Cambodia is the clearest case study. Ten years ago, the country was essentially a garment outpost. Seventy percent of exports were low-value textiles. Now that share is down to 40 percent, the rest is machinery, plastics, agrifood goods. Today, 65 percent of Cambodia’s exports are domestically value-added. Once you see this shift, it’s impossible not to ask: Why have we spent so much time worrying about “debt traps” and so little time asking how Cambodia suddenly became a place that produces complex goods?
Much of the answer lies in BRI-linked zones like Sihanoukville, where 32,000 Cambodians now work for wages that have tripled national averages. To Western observers, this counts as mere job creation. But to families in Sihanoukville, this is emancipation. A rupture from the economic fatalism of the past. If you want to understand the real BRI story, you need to stop counting ports and start counting promotions.
Where Entrepreneurs Slip In
As roads and rails go up, so do opportunities for entrepreneurs. Infrastructure reduces the cost of being ambitious. It allows suppliers, logistics firms, and service providers to cluster, to learn from one another, to scale.
In Pakistan’s Rashakai zone, small manufacturers have absorbed practices from multinational firms and risen to meet their standards. In Bangladesh, graduates trained in China have returned home to build tech start-ups, knitting the knowledge they gained abroad into local markets.
And as wage-earning populations expand, so do domestic demand. New consumers buy more, and new services rise to meet them. Economists love to model this as “multiplier effects,” but in human terms it’s far simpler. When places become connected, people feel confident enough to take risks, be it starting a new business, expanding operation, or investing in new offering.
Governments that want to harness this momentum need to offer SMEs credit, access to land, and a fair shot at procurement. Without these, the entrepreneurial spillover dries up. With them, it accelerates.
The Human Dividend
To be clear, the BRI is not saintly. It can create dependency. It can privilege foreign contractors. It can leave local industries underdeveloped. But pretending that the alternative is a world free of such risks is willfully naive. The IMF has been accused of fostering dependency for decades. The difference is in the mechanism, not the outcome.
What sets the BRI apart, and what its critics often overlook, is that its greatest risks and its greatest rewards hinge on the choices of partner governments. Develop institutions, integrate supply chains, demand transparency, invest in your people, and the BRI becomes catalytic. Fail at these, and it becomes ornamental.
The uncomfortable truth is that countries often fear the wrong thing. The BRI won’t swallow their sovereignty. Their own inaction will.
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What sets the BRI apart, and what its critics often overlook, is that its greatest risks and its greatest rewards hinge on the choices of partner governments.
A Modern Silk Road of Skill
Strip away the commentary, and the logic becomes obvious. Infrastructure is a human project before it is a political one. A railway is a classroom on wheels. A port is a laboratory. A power grid is a training ground for electricians and engineers.
The ancient Silk Road didn’t matter because silk moved. It mattered because skills moved in the form of navigation, metalwork, and mathematics. Its modern incarnation could play the same role, if we stop arguing about who built the tracks long enough to ask who gets to learn from them.
Asia’s future won’t be shaped by whose flag sits on the financing document. It will be shaped by the young woman at the controls of a cross-border train, because she represents something far more durable than geopolitics – human capacity.
And capacity, once built, is very hard to take back.
Foong is a Programme Associate at GIFT ASEAN, where he is involved in planning and executing leadership programmes aimed at redesigning society for a sustainable future. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Science, majoring in Medical Biotechnology. His interests include environmental sustainability, alternative development models, and Southeast Asian history.
Thomas is an intern at the Global Institute For Tomorrow (GIFT), where he supports the team on programme delivery and research across leadership development, sustainability, political economy, and broader international development issues in Southeast Asia. He is currently in his final year, pursuing a Bachelor of Social Science (Honours) in International Relations at Taylor’s University, Malaysia.
