[tyng]

I have worked in many overseas development projects run by Chinese companies. It's not that the Chinese companies only want to hire their own workers, but the fact that the local workforce do not have the skill/equipment/capital to handle large scale development projects.

Some countries require by law that the Chinese developers have a minimum number of local workers. This mitigates the problem somewhat and hopefully over time the locals will develop the skills to run their own projects.

In the long run, infrastructure investment benefits local communities and opens up more opportunities for the local workforce. It's almost always better to have the infrastructure built than not, earlier than later, and foreign money is a good source of capital for it.

[wastedhours]

> It's not that the Chinese companies only want to hire their own workers, but the fact that the local workforce do not have the skill/equipment/capital to handle large scale development projects.

I've often thought that but caught myself thinking I was just buying into the narrative - refreshing to hear it might be slightly less cynical than my brain would have me believe (though still undoubtedly to some degree). My assumption being the skillset to build a transnational highway and scalable mining infrastrcuture is different than doing those things at localised levels.

[3131s]

It really depends on what is being called "infrastructure" and how much the local government is extracting from the foreign governments that will benefit (and if those funds are redistributed to the benefit of the people obviously too).

[adventured]

> In the long run, infrastructure investment benefits local communities and opens up more opportunities for the local workforce. It's almost always better to have the infrastructure built than not, earlier than later, and foreign money is a good source of capital for it.

That's only true if the economy develops to a high enough level, fast enough, to afford to maintain the infrastructure being built that isn't actually natural to the present scale of the economy. That's a large assumption and the consequence of being wrong is disastrous for a poor country. Any time you try to force-leap a country forward, there are immense risks if the underlying economy doesn't keep up, and it won't be China that pays for it later on.

[chewz]

Classic example Hambantota port in Sri Lanka

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/world/asia/china-sri-lank...

[jacknews]

That may be true for infrastructure projects, but I don't think it washes for hotels and casinos.

https://www.phnompenhpost.com/business/chinese-own-more-90-s...