The impetus behind a 21st-century revival of the ancient Silk Road connecting East and West was always more than just trade.

When Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the concept during a speech in Kazakhstan in 2013, he spoke also of the benefits of cooperation between people of different races, beliefs and cultural backgrounds in pursuit of peaceful development.

In little more than half a decade, the original idea has blossomed into the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that already links more than 120 countries and around 4.4 billion of the world’s population.

On sites from Central Asia to Africa to the Greek port of Piraeus, the spectacle of Chinese engineers and technicians working alongside their local counterparts has become commonplace. The BRI has accelerated this process by providing jobs along the Belt and Road routes for tens of thousands of local people in Chinese financed and operated projects.

The advent of BRI has, however, also created its own challenges in terms of people-to-people relationships in the workplace and the boardroom. With the strengthening of China’s involvement in not only building, but also operating major infrastructure projects, Chinese executives and managers and their international counterparts have had to learn to adapt to each other’s business cultures.

The BRI marked a switch from the model in which Chinese companies built infrastructure projects linked, say, to transport and resources via bilateral arrangements that allowed them a degree of autonomy. Now, Chinese companies are increasingly required to work effectively beyond the building of infrastructure or a construction project, and be expert at what we broadly call “asset management” – managing the continuing operations of a project that must generate adequate returns. That includes finance, procurement and personnel.

The transition from construction contractor to investor and operator is new to Chinese companies, so they have had to seek partnerships and develop new relationships with a wide range of multinational companies and financiers.

This new requirement to work in tandem with local and global partners in previously unfamiliar settings has put Chinese personnel on a steep learning curve. It has required a much deeper understanding of local political, fiscal, and economic, business and community dynamics. It has required new skill sets to navigate this.

There is ample evidence, however, that China understands the challenges and recognizes the value of partnerships. There is now a regular flow of Chinese delegations to states along the Belt and Road, dispatched to study local regulations, operating methods and the needs of their customers.

However, nicely compiled study tour reports are no substitute for the practical experiences built up over decades by the international companies operating in those territories. China’s partners in the developed economies -- Europe in particular – have deep expertise in achieving commercial and social successes in some of the BRI developing countries.

There is now an unprecedented opportunity to build world-class, multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary partnerships between China, the developed economies and the BRI recipient countries to create win-win solutions and ecosystems.

In particular, foreign companies with advanced capabilities and prior experience in certain BRI countries, and which have established relationships with local authorities and stakeholders, could be valuable partners for Chinese companies, as PwC laid out a report we published in 2017 to coincide with the inaugural Belt and Road Forum on International Cooperation in Beijing.

The report, entitled “Repaving the Ancient Silk Routes”, identified six partnership roles that international business and financing communities can play in BRI: as investors, as suppliers, as partners in engineering, procurement and construction, as experts in international project management, as operators of new facilities and managers of the newly constructed infrastructure, and as sellers of assets.

Such partnerships not only can help further push the boundaries of capability development for Chinese enterprises, but also offer a way to work with experienced companies across the value chain, in order to drive the optimization of asset management.

The formation of project teams and organizations that integrate world-class expertise and skills is fundamental to the success of the BRI. This requires all parties to adapt to each other’s approach to decision-making and ways of working. This challenges the individuals involved to operate outside their comfort zone. In order to tap the benefits of the BRI, they need to focus on building personal relationships, trust and understanding.

One reason why it is important to focus on these is that the BRI is now moving into a second phase. As a multi-decade program, the BRI’s ambition stretches far beyond the initial stage of infrastructure development (transportation, communications and power). The second phase will involve softer sectors such as e-commerce, healthcare, education and financial services, which may benefit developing as well as developed economies.

Another PwC report, “Workforce for the Future, published in February 2019, we identified multiple challenges facing the workforce on a global basis: technological breakthroughs, demographic shifts, rapid urbanization, shifts in global economic power that are redistributing power, wealth, competition and opportunity around the globe; resource scarcity and climate change that are impacting every sector. China will not be immune to these megatrends.

What is more pronounced for China is perhaps the need to build an internationally adaptable workforce, to integrate expertise and technology in a way that are relatively new to Chinese companies, and to have a clearly defined strategy for how it will work with the international business communities to build and deliver world-class partnerships.

Part of the solution lies in the field of education, be it classroom, on-the-job, skills, vocational, professional trainings or people exchanges. Over the past 40 years of Chinese economic reform, an estimated 4.5 million Chinese students have attended universities in the US and Europe. Current enrollments stand at 600,000 a year, while the proportion of those returning home to work in China after graduation -- the so-called sea turtles -- has grown to more than 80 percent.

Since the advent of the BRI, traffic has also been moving in the opposite direction. Growing numbers of students, many from countries along the Belt and Road corridors, are signing up for courses at Chinese institutions.

By 2017, there were almost half a million international students studying in China, many of them from Belt and Road partners in Africa and other parts of Asia. That was a 10 percent increase on the previous year and a three-fold rise since 2004.

PwC China launched the “Belt & Road United platform” to help China and world to build world-class partnerships. This is a network mechanism bringing businesses together with global first-class experts and strong capabilities in overseas investments and cross-border transactions. It helps Chinese enterprises explore suitable investment opportunities, understand local business culture and also seek the right partners in BRI countries.

In the end, it is of course people who make decisions and who implement projects. It is people who interact with other people, and who communicate and carry the hopes and ambitions of projects as world-shaping that Belt and Road aspires to be.

To be sympathetic toward diversity in culture, religion, history, language and practices, China can leverage and learn. The more we understand each other, the closer we work together, the stronger we can be, and the better outcome we can deliver for all.

Bob Moritz is global chairman of PwC.

The author contributed this article to China Watch exclusively. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.

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