Laos—a landlocked country wedged between China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma—is suffering an exodus of human capital, as organized crime fueled by Chinese money lures graduates away with paychecks that dwarf local wages.
Students who master the Mandarin language at the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) soft-power project, the Confucius Institute, hosted by the National University of Laos (NUOL), are sliding straight into jobs at Chinese-run telecom-fraud centers, says Liu Ao, a Chinese national who spent two years at the campus’s international development graduate program.
