The best way to describe it is by taking a look at China’s aviation. Private pilot training and civil aviation is pretty much non-existent over there. Literally, there’s only a handful private airplanes in the country of 1.3 billion people. That’s very unlikely to change anytime soon.

Yet, their airlines are growing very fast and their military does not have enough retiring pilots to fulfill the needs of the passenger and the cargo airlines.

Multi crew pilot license is a way to by-pass single engine flight training as such flying barely exists there anyways. So basically they go straight from private pilot training to highly advanced airplanes. Their training is actually much longer in those types of airplanes than in let’s say the US but of course they have very little single engine experience.

Also, once they start “flying” for their respective airlines they spend literally years in the “jumpseat” working the radios and learning by observing the captain and the copilot. Several years of this 'observing experience' combined with hundreds of additional hours in simulators will finally get them advanced to the copilot seat. It is a ‘quicker’ way to train their pilots but it’s hardly cheaper for the airlines.

I’m not defending either system just stating that their only options were basically to keep hiring foreign pilots or to speed up the training of their ‘native’ pilots by using the multi crew license.

After all, very few countries in the world have as many civilian trained pilots as the US does.