Infrastructure is complete. What will take its place will require another type of Pakistani worker altogether.
In September 2025, the 14th Joint Cooperation Committee met in Beijing and did not dominate the headlines in Pakistan like a ribbon cutting on a motorway would. But the agreements signed there are more important to a 22-year-old engineering student from Lahore than any road that was constructed between Kashgar and Gwadar.
CPEC, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, is now in its second structural phase – one where megawatts of renewable energy, special economic zones, digital infrastructure and agri-technology, rather than coal and kilometers of asphalt, shape the economic landscape. This transition is not cosmetic. It is a real shift towards what Beijing calls high-quality development: green industry, technology transfer, and digital infrastructure.
This change is not just a geopolitical phenomenon. Nowadays, for professional class of Pakistan, it has become a matter of economic survival.
CPEC Phase-I, launched in 2013 and operationalized around 2017, was engineered as an “early harvest” – a quick infusion of Chinese state funds into the most critical and constricting Pakistani bottlenecks. The majority of the estimated $25 billion commitments were directed to coal-fired power plants, transmission lines, the Gwadar port complex and the national motorway network. The 2022 progress report from the Planning Commission estimated that Phase-I created some 75,000 direct jobs, mainly in construction labor and plant operations.
That is a model that is structurally depleted. Much of the road construction is completed. The power plants are operating — but the problem of circular debt is another crisis. The 14th JCC formalized a reimagined five thematic corridors – industrial-growth corridor, innovation and digital corridor, green development corridor with a target of 10,000 megawatts of solar and wind energy, agricultural modernization corridor and socioeconomic corridor focused on human development.
The financing structure is also different. Phase-I was mostly government-to-government and the Chinese state banks had been lending concessional loans to the public entities of Pakistan. CPEC 2.0 promotes business-to-business deals and private Chinese companies such as solar companies, LONGi Green Energy and Zonergy, have begun entering Pakistan under commercial terms. This is consequential. The expectations of private companies are not the same as infrastructure companies. They do not require general laborers. They require technically skilled local staff who are able to operate with Chinese systems.
The Skills Mismatch
Higher Education Commission estimates that about 445,000 university graduates are produced in Pakistan every year. The distribution of those graduates, however, is highly skewed to the needs of CPEC 2.0 that has now started. About 83 per cent of the student body enrolled in the course of study are in social sciences and humanities. Rare talent in these areas continues to be renewable energy technicians, SCADA system operators, drone pilots for precision agriculture, and Mandarin competent IT professionals.
The Ministry of Climate Change estimates that by 2030, if the ambitious 10,000 MW solar target is achieved on schedule, this green development corridor alone would need an estimated 15,000 – 20,000 trained technicians to reach that goal. There is no national programme to produce them in bulk in Pakistan. There are ongoing programmes at NUST and NED but the enrolment in these programmes is low and linkages with industry are weak.
In the meantime, the textile industry, which used to be Pakistan’s biggest semi-skilled graduate employing industry, also continues to be structurally limited by energy costs that have recently jumped above Rs 65 per industrial unit. CPEC’s green corridor won’t solve that right away, though, as the majority of solar capacity will primarily be used for powering SEZ industrial operations. Apparel exports in Pakistan are around $19 billion per year, whereas in Bangladesh are $47 billion, which is something that can’t be achieved without an energy cost saving measure for the legacy sectors, which CPEC 2.0 does not include as its core objective.
What structural change demands?
The JCC process has grown from a level of high-level political signaling to what international political economy scholars call “technocratic diplomacy,” or the process of bureaucratic coordination among different ministries, regulatory agencies, and state enterprises. This is mostly suitable. The issue of CPEC has never been a diplomatic problem, rather it’s an implementation issue arising from institutional capacity gap on the Pakistani side.
There is no parallel “skills JCC” – structured bilateral mechanism, which looks into the labor requirements of each phase of CPEC and prepares its education and vocational training system accordingly. In investor surveys, the Chinese companies working in Pakistan’s SEZs have repeatedly complained about a lack of locally trained technical staff. That is a failure of policy, not the market.
Conclusion
CPEC 2.0 is not a panacea and is not a threat. It is a transition of the economy that can be described in terms of who benefits and who needs to be prepared. With the corridor now shifting, the graduates of Pakistan in Electrical Engineering, Renewable Energy Systems, Agricultural Technology and Information Technology are poised to have better opportunities.
The 14th JCC took decisions in Beijing which will impact Pakistan’s labor market over the next ten years. The proper reaction is not protest or uncritical celebration but critical alignment — of university curricula, of vocational training, of individual professional growth with the logic of industry which is in full swing.
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