Drawing upon a project on British transnational education (TNE) programmes offered in Hong Kong, this paper interrogates the capacity development impact of TNE on the students, the Hong Kong Government and the programme providers. It addresses the questions: "What capacity is being developed in TNE operations?" and "For whom?" Our findings reveal multiple capacities at play. As TNE has been traded between British and Hong Kong universities and facilitated by the Hong Kong Government's "laissez-faire" doctrine, as a commodity in the neoliberal trade-in-education regime, students' interests are often sidelined. This paper calls for a critical reflection on this TNE model.