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China’s Global Network of Shipping Ports Is Too Big for Trump to Unravel
Beijing exerts variable degrees of influence over some 90 deepwater ports overseas.
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Beijing exerts variable degrees of influence over some 90 deepwater ports overseas.
By Peter Martin, Ben Westcott, Viktoria Dendrinou, Marcelo Rochabrun, Demetrios Pogkas and Jin Wu
October 20, 2025
Sitting on either end of the Panama Canal are two massive ports operated by the same Chinese company. Any disruption at the waterway—the conduit for roughly 40% of US container traffic—could cost American businesses hundreds of millions of dollars a day, which explains why President Donald Trump has set his sights on ensuring that the critical maritime choke point is beyond the reach of Beijing’s influence. “China is operating the Panama Canal, and we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back,” Trump said during his inaugural address in January.
Trump’s demand that Panama’s government revoke the rights of CK Hutchison Holding Ltd. to operate the two gateways highlights what for Washington and other world capitals is an uncomfortable reality: China has spent two decades patiently assembling a massive port network spanning every continent except Antarctica.
Chinese companies own or operate terminals at more than 90 deepwater ports overseas, according to data compiled by Isaac Kardon, a senior fellow for China studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That includes 34 of the top 100 busiest ports, as ranked by Lloyd’s List. Holdings include the fifth-largest container port in Europe, the first deep-sea port on South America’s Pacific coast capable of handling ultralarge container vessels and interests in more than one-third of all commercial ports in Africa.
“We often say that to get rich, we must first build roads,” said Chinese President Xi Jinping, addressing workers at Tieshan port on the South China Sea during a 2017 visit. “But in coastal areas, to get rich, we must first build ports.”
China, whose share of global merchandise exports totaled about 15% in 2024, by far the largest of any country, has a clear commercial interest in maintaining a presence along important maritime trade routes. A 2018 study by PwC estimated that every $1 China spends on African ports yields $13 in trade—to say nothing of the geopolitical return on investment.
And for a country with just one overseas military base, collecting ports is a dual-use strategy. In Chinese policymaking circles, the term “maritime strategic strongpoint” has been used interchangeably to describe both types of installations.
“There’s a major Chinese presence in every region, clustered around key maritime choke points,” says Kardon, who’s also the author of China’s Law of the Sea: The New Rules of Maritime Order. “There’s an obvious commercial advantage to this network, but it also raises acute security concerns.”
Ports are part of a broader contest for maritime dominance between China and the US. Both sides have slapped special port fees on each other’s vessels, while the US has rallied allies like South Korea to help revive its moribund shipbuilding industry. In October, China sanctioned the US units of South Korean shipping giant Hanwha Ocean Co. in the latest tit-for-tat move.
The degree of control the Chinese government exercises over these numerous properties varies. Ports operated by CK Hutchison, a conglomerate based in Hong Kong, were once seen as beyond the direct reach of the leadership on the mainland, but that’s changed with the push to limit the territory’s autonomy in recent years. In other cases, Beijing’s influence is less ambiguous: Piraeus in Greece and Chancay in Peru are owned by China Cosco Shipping Corp., which was blacklisted by the Pentagon in January for allegedly having links to the People’s Liberation Army.
Neither Cosco nor Hutchison responded to requests for comment.
US officials claim that Chinese-run ports are helping Beijing to gather intelligence. Ports in Greece, Nigeria and Sri Lanka have welcomed Chinese warships, while China’s first overseas military base, in the tiny African nation of Djibouti, began life as a “logistics hub” next to a Chinese-owned port.
“Ensuring that the world’s ports remain open and secure is critical for global commerce,” said US Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey in a statement to Bloomberg News. “China’s growing global network of ports threatens those objectives.” Kim, a Democrat, sits on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which held a hearing in late January on foreign influence over the Panama Canal.
Chinese analysts and officials say such claims are unfounded. “China is constructing ports for commercial purposes,” says Wang Dong, a professor at Peking University. “Speculation by some US political figures and think tanks about the threat of Chinese ports is groundless.” China’s foreign ministry said in a statement that US accusations about its port network are aimed at “smearing and disrupting China’s economic and trade cooperation with other countries.”
Still, other world leaders share Washington’s concerns. A recent European Commission defense white paper floated the idea of tightening controls on foreign ownership of critical transport infrastructure. India has bristled at Chinese influence over ports in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, while Australia plans to reclaim the port of Darwin from its Chinese leaseholder.
US officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio say the presence of Chinese ports on the Panama Canal could allow Beijing to slow US naval deployments to Asia in the event of a Chinese invasion or blockade of Taiwan, adding 10 to 22 days to the journey from the Atlantic.
“If China tried to end the autonomy of Taiwan in the next one to five years, it would be a race against time to get ships into the theater,” says Evan Ellis, a professor of Latin American studies at the US Army War College. In an extreme scenario, China could shut down the canal by demolishing a bridge, mining the canal or interfering with the operations of its lock systems, according to Ellis.
The
Trump administration has pressed Panama to revoke CK Hutchison’s
concession to administer ports there. When a consortium led by BlackRock
Inc. and Mediterranean Shipping Co. stepped forward in March with an
offer of almost $23 billion to acquire 43 of Hutchison’s ports,
including those in Panama, Trump called it a win. Officials in Beijing,
however, reportedly pressed CK Hutchison’s founder, Li Ka-shing, to have
a Chinese company join the acquiring consortium. Bloomberg News
reported in July that Cosco is in the process of negotiating a powerful
role for itself, including the right to veto any future port
divestments.
***
Panama isn’t the only country where Chinese investment in ports has become a political flash point.
On his first official trip to Athens in 2019, Xi visited Piraeus Port, where he was greeted by Cosco employees waving Chinese and Greek flags amid cranes and containers. He called Piraeus, Europe’s fifth-busiest container port, the “dragon’s head.”
Piraeus has been key to maritime trade for centuries, thanks to its location where Europe meets Asia—the same nexus that helped make the country a superpower in ancient times. Cosco bought a 67% stake in Piraeus Port Authority in 2016, during a major privatization of Greek assets necessitated by the country’s sovereign debt crisis.
At the time, the deal was seen as a boon by Greece and its international creditors, which made the sale a precondition for fresh loans. For Cosco, the acquisition has been a roaring success, with revenue more than doubling since the deal went through, to €231 million ($269 million) in 2024.
Yet many officials in Brussels and Washington now regard the Chinese investment as a strategic blunder. “Piraeus was a wake-up call,” says Geoffrey Pyatt, a former American ambassador to Greece. “It took a while for the US at least to come to perceive China’s move into the facility as a strategic challenge.”
Piraeus was the most prominent in a spree of Chinese acquisitions of stakes in ports or terminals across Europe. About one-tenth of all European port capacity is now in the hands of Chinese investors.
“There was a strong profit motive, as Europe is one of the major destinations for Chinese exports,” says Francesca Ghiretti, director of the RAND Europe China Initiative in London. But “people worry about what happens if Cosco or Hutchison pull out,” she says. “China has a lot of leverage.”
These concerns led Europe to adopt new investment screening tools in 2017, but by then the Piraeus deal had been finalized. Local residents, environmental groups and workers at the port have complained about waste, pollution and unsafe working conditions, yet there’s no sign that Greek authorities are contemplating challenging Cosco’s ownership for now.
***
Some
80 kilometers (50 miles) outside Lagos—Nigeria’s commercial capital—the
giant cranes at Lekki Deep Sea Port tower over reclaimed swampland.
Completed in 2023 at a cost of $1.5 billion, the port was financed by
China Development Bank and built by China Harbour Engineering Co.
(CHEC), a state-owned enterprise that owns and operates the facility in
joint ventures with Singapore’s Tolaram Group and other investors.
Like many Chinese-financed megaprojects across the developing world, Lekki was sorely needed. Even though Nigeria is Africa’s fourth-largest economy, few Western firms have been willing to foot the bill for critical infrastructure in a nation where corruption is widespread and protections for investors are seen as weak.
Although Nigeria has six major seaports, about 80% of imports were handled by two ports in Lagos, whose rutted roads are perpetually jammed with trucks. Ships often waited as long as a month to unload their cargo. Nigerian officials and Lekki executives say the port is helping to drive wait times down. (Delays and inefficiencies are among the main reasons costs at African ports are 50% higher than the global average, according to the African Development Bank.)
“One of the biggest problems we’ve had in Nigeria is lack of infrastructure,” says Adesuwa Ladoja, chief executive officer of the Lagos Free Zone, which houses the port and is owned by Tolaram. “We had a project with the potential to transform Nigeria. China had access to capital and expertise.”
In September 2024, CHEC agreed to build a 68-kilometer passenger railway connecting Lagos’ central business district to another nearby free-trade zone owned by a consortium of Chinese companies and the government of Lagos State. Companies situated in either of the zones are exempt from federal and state taxes and do not need licenses to transport goods in or out of the country.
“There’s a coordinated nature to Chinese investments in ports and other logistics infrastructure,” says Yunnan Chen, a research fellow at ODI Global, a UK think tank. “For African countries, it’s an opportunity to stimulate domestic manufacturing and exports, but it’s also a way for Chinese port and rail projects to ensure a stream of freight cargo.”
Africa boasts some of the world’s largest unexploited reserves of natural resources, including minerals such as copper and cobalt that are integral to the production of batteries for electric vehicles—an industry China dominates. Yet the continent has the world’s lowest share of maritime trade.
For China, the benefits aren’t just commercial: Almost half of the African ports in which Chinese firms are involved have hosted Chinese navy ships as part of drills or resupply operations, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
A Chinese commercial port in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, laid the groundwork for Beijing’s construction of the country’s lone overseas military base. (Several foreign powers including the US, Japan, France and Italy have built military installations in Djibouti to take advantage of its strategic location at the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, a conduit for shipping between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.) “This spectacle—of a Chinese commercial investment facilitating significant military access—confirmed many existing fears about the strategic motivations underlying Chinese port development,” says the Carnegie Endowment’s Kardon.
US
officials have warned that Beijing is eyeing Gabon and Equatorial
Guinea, where it’s already built a deep-sea port, as possible locations
for future military bases. Washington would view any Chinese base on the
Atlantic as a major security threat.
***
Chancay, a deepwater port in Peru, could help China in a different kind of conflict: Trump’s trade war.
The $1.3 billion facility sits in a mist-covered bay surrounded by rocky hills adjacent to a small fishing town of about 63,000 people. Financed by a consortium of Chinese banks and majority owned and operated by Cosco, Chancay is the first port on South America’s Pacific coast that can accommodate ultralarge container vessels—ships as long as four football fields that can carry as many as 24,000 containers. This is a major leap for a region long plagued by deficient infrastructure, causing transport delays that make exports less competitive.
The port’s official opening in November of last year has already slashed transit times for cargos of Peruvian agricultural products bound for China, Beijing’s ambassador to Peru, Song Yang, said in a speech in April. Peru is the world’s top exporter of blueberries and grapes, which go primarily to the US. “Chancay is going to enable us to have the perfect market diversification for our fruit exports,” says Ángel Manero, Peru’s former agriculture minister. “It means 30% of our fruits go to the US, 30% to Europe and 30% to Asia.”
In time, Chancay could also permit China to lessen its dependence on shipments of American soybeans and corn, replacing them with supplies from South America and giving Beijing increased leverage in trade negotiations with Washington. (Brazilian farmers were among the winners when Trump first began hiking tariffs on China in 2018.) In July officials from China and Brazil signed a memorandum of understanding to conduct a feasibility study for a transcontinental railway that would run from Peru’s Pacific coast to Brazil’s Atlantic shores.
A June report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington identified 37 port projects linked to China across Latin America and the Caribbean, warning that such facilities could be used for intelligence collection or covert military operations, while also boosting Beijing’s economic weight in the region.
Three of South America’s four largest economies, Peru among them, already trade more with China than with the US. Mauricio Claver-Carone, Trump’s former envoy for Latin America, says Chancay will deepen “an unreliable dependency on China.” He adds: “I think the Peruvian government recognizes that they have a problem.”
Any sale of Hutchison’s Panama ports would likely also include four terminals in Mexico and one in the Bahamas, further elevating Chancay’s importance to China. That would mean “Chancay is the new most important focal point for rewiring trade in Latin America to the mainland,” says Ryan Berg, director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
***
Nowhere
is Chinese ownership under more pressure than in Australia, where the
government is on the verge of reclaiming the strategically important
Darwin Port. Because of its location—where the Pacific meets the Indian
Ocean and the closest point on the continent to Asia—Darwin is
Australia’s front line in any future conflict. (It’s also the only major
city in Australia to have suffered significant damage during World War
II, when the Japanese bombed the harbor in 1942.)
In 2015 the government of Australia’s Northern Territory leased the port to the Landbridge Group, owned by Chinese billionaire Ye Cheng, for 99 years. The move sparked instant controversy and reportedly blindsided Washington, which only three years earlier had begun deploying US Marines to Darwin on annual rotations. “Let us know next time,” then-President Barack Obama told his Australian counterpart, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, according to the Australian Financial Review.
Labor Party lawmaker and Darwin resident Luke Gosling says the lease “bordered on treasonous.” He’s a key figure in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s push to bring the port back under Australian control. “This was the most idiotic decision that I can remember a Northern Territory government making, or a federal government allowing,” Gosling told Bloomberg News in May. A military veteran, Gosling points out that Darwin often hosts drills with the US, Japan and other partners—near or even involving the port.
Since China’s national security laws require its companies to share data with the government, Beijing could use Darwin for intelligence gathering or maritime surveillance, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Australia’s ties with China have soured in the decade since Landbridge was awarded the concession, and in the federal election in May both parties backed reclaiming the port. Having “the major port in northern Australia owned by any foreign interest is not in Australia’s national interest,” said Albanese on a radio interview during the campaign.
China’s response has been wary, but muted. In April its foreign ministry urged Australia not to “politicize” the port’s ownership. Terry O’Connor, Landbridge’s nonexecutive director in Australia, said in a statement that the company “looks forward to engaging with government.”
Political pushback and China’s own economic slowdown mean Beijing is probably done adding to its port empire. Besides, the network is already extensive enough to give China key advantages—and too entrenched for the US to counter, says Kardon. “From a market share standpoint, they’re covering all their major bases,” he says. “It’s not clear they need more.”