“The disengagements that have happened and the buffer zone that has been created are about 6 kilometers inside Indian territory,” Pravin Sawhney, a former Indian army officer and defense analyst said.

Sawhney also pointed out that Chinese troops remain on land claimed by India in other critical areas of the Himalayan border region, including the Depsang Plains adjoining the Siachen Glacier, a militarily sensitive region bordered by India, China and Pakistan.

“We have witnessed and lost access to our traditional grazing area, and now nomads have to move around over 15 kilometers to feed their livestock,” said Konchok Stanzin, who represents a border constituency on a local council. “The government should provide compensation to keep alive nomads’ culture and tradition in eastern Ladakh.”

“Between 2012 and 2020, there were four different occasions when the PLA came in and took over Indian territory along the border and each time while India disengaged and withdrew its troops, China did not reciprocate,” Aparna Pande, research fellow and director at the Hudson Institute’s Initiative on the Future of India and South Asia, said. “This time, India has disengaged but the extra troops will only be withdrawn if, and when, China does the same.”

“If [China] wants to stage another provocation, it can do that, and New Delhi has little capacity to deter it,” Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia program at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based research group, said. “In fact, even with the recent disengagement, there are some indications that there are still some Chinese troops hunkered down on Indian territory.”

India’s involvement in the Quad is an annoyance for China,Yun Sun, a senior fellow and co-director of the East Asia Program acknowledged, but “until that involvement translates into material impact on the border, I don’t think China will take actions to push back.”

At a vocational school in Indonesia’s East Java, classes are being taught on automotive engineering and maintenance for new energy vehicles.

In the Portuguese seaside city of Setubal, students are earning degrees in industrial robotics and automation technology.

In Pakistan, which hosts the US$62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a Luban Workshop in Lahore, Punjab province, provides classes in “Industrial Automation & Robotics”, in partnership with the Tianjin Modern Vocational Technology College.

Luban Workshop established in Kenya in late 2019 serves as an opportunity for Kenyan students to partake in world-class and innovative cloud-computing courses. Kenya’s Ministry of Information Communication and Technology (ICT), has also hailed the workshop for “enhancing cooperation in digital space”, emphasising that the cloud-computing and information-security training at the workshop’s core were critically important for the country.

In Djibouti, the first cohort of students from Africa’s inaugural Luban Workshop will be putting their degrees to use immediately upon graduating later this year. Trained in railway operations and management; rail-engineering technology; and business and logistics, they are set to work on the China-funded Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway.

And soon, a vocational school in central Asia’s Tajikistan will start offering degrees in urban thermal-energy planning.

In 2020, Tianjin Medical College partnered with the University of Arts and Humanities of Bamako, Mali, to open a non-degree-offering Luban Workshop specialising in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). In recent years, China has been promoting TCM as a cheaper alternative to Western medicine across the African continent.

Britain also has its own Luban Workshop. The city of Liverpool hosts a culinary workshop training local chefs in the intricacies of Chinese cuisine, which it says helps meet the changing tastes of the country.

Named after master carpenter and inventor Lu Ban, said to have lived during the Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BC), the first vocational centre under his moniker opened six years ago at northern Thailand’s Phranakhon Si Ayutthaya Technical College.

President Xi Jinping promoted Luban Workshops as a means for countries to develop their economies, saying 10 centres were planned across SCO member-states, according to Chinese state media reports.

“They are trained and equipped with targeted skills in collaboration with the enterprises they will work at after graduating,” Yu Zhongwu, president of the Tianjin Railway Technical and Vocational College that provides the workshop, was quoted as saying in an August report by the state-run Global Times.

According to state media reports, more than 3,000 students have received certifications from Luban Workshops globally, with a further 12,000 currently being trained. By comparison, a 2018 estimate by the World Bank said Indonesia needed an additional 9 million workers skilled in information and communication technology to reach its 2030 development goals.

All of these schools exist under the same educational umbrella stemming from the northern Chinese port city of Tianjin. Formed in partnerships between a host country’s local institutions and vocational schools in Tianjin – under the guidance of China’s Ministry of Education – the workshops promise to shore up the abilities and know-how of local workforces. 

[Information Taken from South China Morning Post & Global Times & Bloomberg]