Wang Jinjie: Making the Belt and Road Work After the Ribbon-Cutting
PKU scholar says high-quality Belt and Road cooperation needs stronger local skills, maintenance networks, and governance systems to deliver lasting returns.
“Small and beautiful” has become one of the key phrases in China’s evolving Belt and Road vocabulary. The idea gained official prominence in 2021, when Xi Jinping called for such projects to be prioritised in external cooperation, stressing that they directly affect people’s daily lives and should be practical, locally grounded, and capable of winning public support.
The following article can be read as an explanation of what this shift requires in practice. It argues that Belt and Road projects should no longer treat training, maintenance, and governance as add-ons after construction is completed. Instead, job-specific skills supply, operation and maintenance systems, and governance capacity should be written into feasibility studies and project plans from the outset. At the policy level, evaluation, financing, and resource allocation should give greater weight to operational continuity, employment quality, skills upgrading, and risk-governance performance, rather than focusing only on delivery speed or investment scale.
This article, originally published on Guangming Online on 31 December 2025, is written by Wang Jinjie, a Research Assistant Professor at Peking University’s National School of Development (NSD) and Institute of South–South Cooperation and Development (ISSCAD), and Deputy General Secretary of the Peking University Center for African Studies.
Wang Jinjie has kindly authorised and reviewed the translation.
—Yuxuan Jia
以人力资本与能力红利推动共建“一带一路”高质量发展
Driving High-Quality Development of the Belt and Road Cooperation Through Human Capital and Capability Dividends
The 2025 Central Economic Work Conference placed high-level opening up and the high-quality development of the Belt and Road cooperation high on next year’s economic agenda. It made clear that China will stabilise foreign trade and foreign investment, and expand the space for international cooperation, by advancing institutional opening up and improving the quality of external cooperation. It also positioned Belt and Road cooperation as a key vehicle for promoting open growth and mutually beneficial cooperation across multiple sectors. As Belt and Road cooperation enters a deeper stage, the focus of external cooperation is shifting from a sole emphasis on project construction and capital input towards greater attention to rule alignment, long-term operation, and overall performance improvement.
Against this backdrop, human capital and the capability dividend provide crucial support and deep-seated momentum for the high-quality development of the Belt and Road cooperation. Human capital focuses on skills and learning capacity at the individual level, influencing the local workforce’s ability to perform their duties and support the operation of production and service systems; the capabilities dividend, meanwhile, corresponds to the sustained output capacity at the organisational and institutional levels. It determines whether cooperation projects can transform physical assets into sustainable industrial and public service carrying capacity. It is necessary to incorporate skills supply, operation and maintenance systems, and governance capacity into the project’s full lifecycle planning. This can turn a one-off investment into long-term capability accumulation, allowing economic and livelihood benefits to be continuously converted into real outcomes during operation, and thereby supporting the high-quality development of Belt and Road cooperation.
Human Capital Gaps and Bottlenecks in Cooperation Performance
In the early stage of Belt and Road cooperation, infrastructure connectivity served as a breakthrough, effectively easing hard constraints in transport, energy, communications, and other sectors, and providing important support for the development of partner countries. However, as project scale continues to expand and cooperation chains extend further, the main constraints facing many projects no longer lie solely in construction capacity. They increasingly concern whether completed projects can remain stable, usable, sustainable over the long term, and capable of continuous optimisation.
In some countries, even after roads, ports, power stations, and other facilities have been built, problems may still arise, including high equipment downtime, slow service response, frequent supply-chain disruptions, and inefficient management. These challenges manifest primarily in three types of gaps. First, an insufficient supply of job-specific skills and grassroots management capacity, meaning that facilities may be completed but not used efficiently. Second, spare parts, maintenance, and service networks remain underdeveloped, leading to unstable availability and rising life-cycle costs. Third, standardised procedures and governance systems are weak, leading to a lack of institutional support for quality control, accountability, and performance improvement. Hardware improvements do not automatically translate into better development performance. For projects to truly deliver economic and social benefits, they must complete the transition from construction delivery to operational governance.
Industrial cooperation projects are even more sensitive to these capability gaps. Industrial parks and manufacturing investment offer a clear example. In the early stage of production, the difficulties faced by enterprises are often not limited to market conditions. They also include practical constraints such as shortages of skilled labour, weak grassroots management and quality-control systems, and reliance on expatriate staff for equipment maintenance and process debugging. Many enterprises are forced to act as both the demand side and the supply side of the labour market. On the one hand, they need large numbers of front-line skilled workers and junior managers. On the other hand, local vocational education and training systems often struggle to provide a matching skills supply quickly enough. As a result, enterprises have to invest in training themselves, establish operating standards, and build on-site management and safety systems.
This can lead to high learning and adjustment costs in the early stage, restrict the pace of scaling up, and slow the development of supporting industrial chains and service networks. The spillover effects of projects are weakened, and the sustainability of cooperation is reduced. Capacity building, therefore, cannot remain at the level of advocacy. It must be brought forward to the very beginning of project design, and run through the entire process of construction, implementation, operation, and maintenance.
The Generation of Capability Dividends and the Mechanism for High-Quality Belt and Road Cooperation
The core of the capability dividend does not lie in increasing investment. Rather, it lies in transforming projects from one-time deliveries into long-term, sustainable public goods and industrial capacity through institutionalised operational structures, talent pipelines, supply networks, and governance mechanisms.
The capability dividend is first reflected in improved operational performance, enabling project assets to move from being merely completed to being used over the long term. The localisation of operation and maintenance in railway cooperation is a representative case. Public information shows that the construction and operation of the Mombasa–Nairobi Railway has created local employment and formed a relatively high level of localised staffing. At the same time, greater participation by local suppliers helps gradually embed the spare parts, maintenance, and services required for operation into local market networks, thereby improving the continuity and maintainability of project operations.
Another example is the China-aided Laos National Seismic Monitoring Network project, which established Laos’s first national seismic information centre. The project also trained technical personnel on the Lao side in network operation and maintenance, data processing, and information release. This strengthened Laos’s capacity for independent seismic monitoring and rapid reporting, turning an engineering network into a capacity for disaster prevention, mitigation, and emergency response. As long as operation and maintenance systems and talent training are incorporated into project design at the same time, project assets can continue to generate public service capacity and form replicable pathways for capacity building on a broader scale.
The capability dividend extends beyond the stable operation of individual projects. Through institutionalised arrangements for industry-education integration, it can also spill over into replicable talent supply and technology diffusion. The Luban Workshop is a useful example. China has worked with partners across Asia, Europe, and Africa to establish more than 30 Luban Workshops, providing academic education and vocational training, and forming platforms for cultivating technical and skilled personnel in partner countries. The governance logic behind this model is to link enterprise job standards, practical training equipment, and curricula; promote school-enterprise collaborative training; and connect trainees effectively with enterprise job systems through practical training and internships. In this way, the model serves enterprises’ labour and operational needs while facilitating the local transfer of technical solutions and process standards.
Against changing external rules and public opinion environments, the capability dividend is also reflected in stronger risk resilience, which transforms external uncertainty into governable costs. In today’s international cooperation environment, green standards, labour norms, supply-chain compliance, data governance, and community relations are increasingly becoming key determinants of a project’s long-term viability. For cooperation projects, the absence of auditable environmental and social governance systems, as well as stable community communication and dispute-prevention mechanisms, means that even smoothly constructed projects may come under pressure during the operational stage because of disputes, shutdowns, or policy fluctuations.
More importantly, many partner countries still face a relatively weak skills supply and insufficient investment in training. If capacity building is not front-loaded and institutionalised, then the deeper projects go and the more complex their technologies become, the more likely they are to encounter a new bottleneck: facilities expand quickly, but governance capacity remains weak. This, in turn, can magnify compliance and social risks. Conversely, if capacity building is used to address gaps in skills supply and governance, external uncertainty can be transformed into governable costs, and regulatory pressure can be turned into long-term competitiveness.
Full Life-Cycle Capacity Building and the Implementation of Policy Tools
To turn the concept of capability dividends into concrete results, the key is to embed capacity building into the full life cycle of projects, forming project governance arrangements that are verifiable, replicable, and sustainable. At the pre-investment assessment and project design stage, job-specific skills supply, operation and maintenance systems, and governance capacity should be incorporated into feasibility studies and project plans. Training plans, teaching staff and practical training conditions, spare parts and maintenance arrangements, and management should all be treated as critical elements. This can reduce, from the outset, the institutional costs of retrofitting capacity after the project is completed.
Bringing capability elements to the very beginning of project design can reduce downtime risks and quality fluctuations during the operational stage, while also reserving sustainable space for local employment and industrial carrying capacity. During the construction and implementation stage, localised employment organisation, on-site management, and quality-control systems should be advanced at the same time. Operational logic should be institutionalised through practical standards, procedures, and chains of responsibility, so that capability formation proceeds in step with engineering progress, rather than being delayed until after production begins. During the operational stage, stable operation and maintenance organisations and performance-management mechanisms should play a guiding role. Continuous improvement should focus on key indicators such as equipment availability, service-response efficiency, local job coverage, and the effectiveness of training and job transfer. This can help shift projects from one-off delivery towards sustained operation and capability accumulation.
Embedding capacity-building throughout the project life cycle also requires macro-level policy instruments that provide incentives, constraints, and public-service support, so that such projects can be replicated and scaled. Cooperation evaluation and resource allocation should be reoriented towards capability-building, with greater weight given to operational continuity, employment quality, skills upgrading, and risk-governance performance. Funds, finance, and policy instruments should be directed towards training, operation and maintenance, and governance-system development, encouraging all parties to convert short-term delivery pressure into long-term operational responsibility.
At the same time, comprehensive overseas service systems and risk-governance tools should be improved around legal compliance, green standards, data governance, community communication, and dispute prevention. This would create accessible professional support and coordinated response mechanisms, reducing social risks caused by unfamiliarity with local institutions, insufficient communication, or weak governance. Only by linking capability-oriented evaluation incentives, job-oriented skills supply, and replicable governance tools can the capability dividend be released at scale. Only then can high-quality Belt and Road cooperation move beyond the accumulation of individual projects towards a broader leap in capability.
Human capital is the micro-level foundation of capability formation, while the capability dividend is the long-term return on systemic capacity. Only by front-loading and institutionalising skills supply, operation and maintenance systems, and governance mechanisms through full life-cycle capacity-building can completed assets be turned into durable services, project returns into industrial capabilities, and external risks into governable costs. In this way, high-level opening up can generate more inclusive, sustainable, and replicable outcomes for common development.
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