Beijing’s growing economic prowess across Southeast Asia and Africa is redefining its geopolitical ambitions. As its footprint expands through strategic corridors of infrastructure, energy, and connectivity, the risks associated with its overseas projects have also grown. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), once imagined as grounded in mutual benefit and global cooperation, now increasingly intersects with zones of fragility, internal conflict, and contested sovereignty. In such environments, the Chinese state has begun relying on a growing and under-examined tool of coercive protection: private security companies.
Until recently, they operated in a subdued and largely static role, but now they are no longer limited to safeguarding compounds or escorting engineers. Instead, they are gradually emerging as a new layer in China’s external security strategy—less visible than the People’s Liberation Army, more deniable than diplomacy, and far more politically flexible than direct intervention. Framed as commercial entities, these private armies provide Beijing with a mechanism to defend its investments without the reputational costs of overt military projection. As their operational remit expands, particularly in regions like Myanmar, the claim that they are merely commercial risk managers becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.
Expansion of Chinese interests
Myanmar offers a telling example. Until recently, Chinese security companies were primarily deployed to protect energy infrastructure and economic zones such as the oil and gas pipelines in Rakhine State’s Kyaukphyu. But recent developments point to a shift in both scale and function. In February 2025, reports estimated that between 50 and 100 additional Chinese private security personnel were deployed to Kyaukphyu, with the official mandate of reinforcing security across vital infrastructure points. They arrived after the Chinese government deployed over 300 Chinese workers in the region for infrastructural work. But it seems that these forces are assisting Myanmar’s military junta not only with defensive perimeters but also with drone operations and sniper deployments targeting insurgent groups. This is a significant recalibration—from passive protection to selective participation in combat activity. If confirmed, it would mark the first time Chinese security companies have taken an operational role in live conflict beyond the narrow confines of infrastructure protection.
The Kyaukphyu pipeline is a vital geostrategic asset for Beijing, allowing it to access energy supplies from the Indian Ocean without relying on the Strait of Malacca, a choke point long viewed by Chinese strategists as a vulnerability in times of crisis. The increasing instability in northern Myanmar, where various ethnic armed groups have launched offensives against the junta, poses a direct threat to this corridor. For China, the loss or disruption of such infrastructure is not merely economic: it touches on questions of national energy security, regional influence, and the credibility of the BRI itself.
What makes China’s use of private security firms distinct is the blurred boundary between state and market. While officially registered as private companies, many of these firms—like DeWe Security or Frontier Services Group—were founded by former PLA officers and maintain close ties with China’s security establishment. Their deployment abroad is not simply a market response to high-risk environments. It is part of a larger strategy in which the state outsources certain coercive functions while maintaining control over narrative and deniability. These entities operate within a grey zone—never fully state, never fully private, but always politically useful.
What we are witnessing, then, is a subtle but significant transformation in the way China manages its overseas presence. The traditional image of Chinese expansion, diplomatic soft power, infrastructure diplomacy, and cautious neutrality is being complicated by the arrival of coercive actors who do not wear state insignia but operate with its silent support. In doing so, they allow China to project strength without the appearance of occupation, and to influence outcomes on the ground without formal entanglement.
It is this contradiction that makes China’s private armies politically consequential. Their presence challenges the sovereignty of host nations, even when invited, by creating parallel structures of security beholden not to local governments but to Beijing’s strategic calculus. In fragile states like Myanmar, this can tilt the balance in internal conflicts, erode trust among local communities, and generate long-term political costs—particularly in regions like Southeast Asia where historical memories of foreign domination remain sensitive.
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Strategic risks
The political utility of these private armies may be high, but the risks are equally significant. When security on national soil is outsourced to foreign forces answerable to another government’s strategic priorities, the line between protection and interference becomes blurry. In countries already navigating civil conflict and contested legitimacy, this can harden perceptions of Chinese complicity and trigger an anti-China backlash.
This model also risks dragging Beijing into asymmetric conflicts it cannot control. Once private security companies are implicated in offensive actions or collateral violence, China’s reputation as a neutral partner, so central to its soft power in the Global South, will take a hit.
Finally, and most critically, the normalization of security companies’ involvement in conflict theatres sets a precedent. Today Myanmar, tomorrow Balochistan? The precedent of Chinese security firms being deployed in live conflict to secure pipelines, ports, or roads will not go unnoticed either by China’s rivals or by host governments uneasy about sovereignty erosion.
Informal Chinese power
If private security personnel are now being drawn into active support roles in live conflicts, similar deployments in Pakistan, parts of Central Asia, or even African conflict zones become not only plausible but likely. The line between infrastructure protection and foreign policy intervention is rapidly thinning, and with it, the claim that China’s rise remains strictly peaceful or commercially motivated.
What remains to be seen is whether Beijing fully controls these actors or whether the outsourcing of force creates its own momentum—one that may ultimately complicate China’s carefully calibrated image as a responsible power. The rise of Chinese security firms may have begun as a logistical necessity but is fast becoming a geopolitical phenomenon.
In such posturing, the world is witnessing the emergence of a new kind of Chinese presence which is not developmental, not diplomatic, but coercively commercial. These are not just private armies protecting pipelines but instruments of geopolitical signalling. They tell the region that China’s investments are non-negotiable, and that Beijing is willing to defend them through means that stop just short of war.
Rishan Sen is researcher focused on China’s foreign policy and strategic footprint across Asia.
