The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a think tank that focuses on research into China, revealed on Friday that the Communist Party developed an application for companies participating in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to use to feed information to Beijing.

The BRI is a global economic development plan in which China offers predatory loans to impoverished countries, meant to be used to pay Chinese companies to build otherwise cost-prohibitive infrastructure projects. When the countries inevitably fail to be able to keep up with loan payments, China seizes their critical assets and leverages the debt to strong-arm the countries into defending China’s agenda at the United Nations and other international venues. Among the most negatively affected countries by the BRI are Sri Lanka, which lost control of its southern Hambantota port for nearly 200 years to China, and Zambia, which went into default as a result of the massive loans it took out from China.

In addition to the economic threat the BRI poses and its role in Chinese colonialism, the ASPI’s report on Monday revealed that the Chinese Foreign Ministry has built a “secure digital platform” for Chinese companies abroad to send intelligence back home.

The platform, called “Safe Silk Road,” allows the Communist Party to mandate that “participating companies … submit regular reports about their activities and local security conditions to the government.”

“Companies are asked to submit quarterly reports through the app,” ASPI explained. “Those reports include basic information such as the name, national ID number and contact information of the owner … the amount of investment in US dollars, the number of Chinese and local employees, and whether it has registered with a local Chinese embassy or consulate.”

The application also allows companies to report “sudden incidents,” including terror attacks or violence erupting against Chinese businessmen, engineers, or others tied to the BRI operating in challenging conditions.

While the ASPI noted that other countries have developed applications to offer information to citizens abroad and connect them to their embassies, the BRI platform differs from those in that it “asks for detailed information from those companies about their own activities.”

“For some companies, participation may even be compulsory,” the research institute added.

ASPI estimated that dozens of Chinese companies are using the app.

“China has a widely recognised deficiency: gaps in its overseas intelligence collection capabilities,” the institute concluded. “Safe Silk Road is part of the toolbox that the External Security Affairs Department uses to extend the range and effectiveness of Beijing’s information-gathering and to better understand the situation on the ground everywhere that China has interests.”

The ASPI has become one of the world’s premier sources of knowledge and understanding on the operations of the Chinese Communist Party. In 2020, the ASPI published its landmark report Uyghurs for Sale, which revealed a state-managed slave trade in China selling people, mostly ethnic Uyghurs from occupied East Turkistan, to factories around the country. The report revealed the displacement of thousands of Uyghurs to become slaves around the country – a fact that makes attempts to keep slave-made products out of American hands by limiting imports from East Turkistan largely obsolete.

More recently, an ASPI report this month found that China has become a world leader in “critical” technologies, described as “defense, space, energy, the environment, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, robotics, cyber, computing, advanced materials and key quantum technology areas.”

“The U.S. led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven,” ASPI detailed. “China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–20074 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies.”

The existence of a mobile phone application to facilitate intelligence-gathering by state-run and nominally private corporations follows years of concerns that, in addition to the economic threat posed by the BRI, China is using the initiative to collect information from around the world. The application gives those information operations a veneer of legitimacy, in contrast with widespread reports that China has used hackers and other illicit means to spy on BRI partners. In May, Reuters reported the discovery of a cyber-espionage campaign by China against Kenya, a core BRI partner.

ASPI noted that some of the need to collect intelligence from the ground stems from violence against Chinese people present in some of the most volatile BRI countries.

“Private security contracting companies are increasingly offering their services to Chinese companies abroad,” ASPI noted. “The number of Chinese private security contractors has expanded dramatically in recent years as BRI companies have faced growing security challenges.”

Pakistan and Afghanistan – where the Taliban has expressed interest in becoming a formal BRI partner – have proven particularly volatile. Multiple terrorist attacks in Pakistan have targeted Chinese nationals, including a string of attacks in August attributed to the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), a separatist group seeking to sever ties to Islamabad. In Afghanistan, the Taliban has blamed the Islamic State terrorist group for targeting sites known to be frequented by visiting Chinese.

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