China Is Not Winning Influence in PNG Through Roads—but Through Classrooms

by Bernard Yegiora

Public debate in PNG tends to frame China’s influence almost entirely through infrastructure, loans, and geopolitics. Roads, ports, and Belt and Road headlines dominate commentary. While these issues matter, this framing obscures where China’s most durable and cost-effective influence is actually being built.

It is not being built in concrete.
It is being built in classrooms. 

Online Mandarin language class delivered by a language teacher from a partner Chinese university, with PNG students at the University of Goroka participating as part of higher education exchange and people-to-people cooperation.

China’s long-term engagement in PNG is increasingly shaped through higher education exchange programs—scholarships, language training, and public-sector capacity building—that quietly influence skills formation, institutional familiarity, and professional networks over time. These programs receive far less public scrutiny than infrastructure projects, yet their effects are longer lasting and harder to reverse.

Infrastructure is visible. Education is not. That difference matters.

Infrastructure projects age, contracts expire, and governments change. Human capital, once formed, persists across administrations, sectors, and political cycles. Skills acquired abroad travel with individuals throughout their careers, shaping how institutions function long after projects are completed or forgotten.

PNG’s policy debates therefore tend to ask the wrong questions. How much debt is involved? Who controls strategic assets? What are the geopolitical implications? These are legitimate concerns, but they are incomplete. They overlook a quieter but more consequential issue: who is being trained, socialised, and professionally shaped—and where?

China’s scholarships, language programs, and short-term training schemes are often described as development assistance or cultural exchange. In practice, they function as strategic influence mechanisms. Participants do not simply gain qualifications. They acquire professional networks, institutional familiarity, language skills, and a lived understanding of how China plans, governs, and negotiates.

When these individuals return to PNG, they do not act as proxies for any foreign power. But neither do they return neutral. Over time, they occupy roles across government departments, universities, state-owned enterprises, the private sector, and civil society. Their professional reference points have been shaped by experience. Influence, in this sense, is embedded rather than imposed.

From a strategic perspective, scholarships matter more than aid. Traditional aid produces projects. Education produces people.

Scholarships and training programs are relatively inexpensive compared to large infrastructure investments, yet they generate long-term returns. They foster goodwill rather than resistance, operate below the threshold of political controversy, and scale influence through individuals rather than physical assets. PNG is already among the largest recipients of Chinese government scholarships in the Pacific, a fact that rarely features in public debate.

More importantly, education creates path dependency. Alumni trained in China are more likely to maintain professional ties with Chinese institutions, recommend China as a partner, interpret Chinese actions with greater contextual understanding, and serve as informal bridges between systems. This is not ideological conversion. It is familiarity shaping preference.

PNG’s central weakness is not participation in education exchanges, but the absence of a coordinated national strategy to manage their long-term effects. The country debates defence agreements and foreign loans in detail, yet does not systematically track how many citizens are trained abroad, in which countries, in what disciplines, and with what reintegration plan upon return.

As a result, education exchange remains reactive rather than strategic. Influence accumulates by default rather than design. Skills are developed without clear alignment to national priorities. Alumni networks exist, but are rarely mobilised deliberately for institutional strengthening or policy development.

This contrasts with China’s coherence. Other partners—Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States—also offer scholarships and training. The difference lies in scale, coordination, and intent. China integrates scholarships, language acquisition, technical training, and institutional partnerships into a single pipeline. Graduates emerge not simply with qualifications, but with lived familiarity with China as a system.

The real policy question for PNG is therefore not whether to engage in education exchanges with China. That decision has already been made. The more important question is how PNG governs foreign-funded human capital formation as a matter of foreign policy rather than administrative convenience.

Without strategy, education exchange becomes a vulnerability. With strategy, it becomes a national asset. Skills can be aligned with development priorities, multiple partners balanced rather than substituted, and alumni networks mobilised in ways that strengthen institutional capacity rather than fragment it.

As geopolitical competition intensifies in the Pacific, influence will be shaped less by who builds the most infrastructure and more by who develops the most capable professionals over time. China understands this logic clearly. PNG has yet to fully internalise it.

Until education exchange is treated as a core foreign-policy instrument rather than a peripheral opportunity, PNG will continue debating the symptoms of influence rather than its sources.

This article forms part of an ongoing research agenda examining how higher education exchange programs shape China–Papua New Guinea relations.

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