How China’s Overseas Security Forces Differ From Wagner

The ascendancy of the Russian mercenary group Wagner is putting a spotlight on the role played by private security companies in developing countries. ​Among them are ​Chinese​​​ ​contractors that have fanned out across Africa and Asia.

Private, military-style security companies are an increasingly visible element of China’s expanding global footprint—hunting pirates from the decks of cargo ships in the Gulf of Aden, guarding a railway in Kenya and protecting a fuel depot in Sri Lanka.

Both the Russian and Chinese versions of private security forces feature murky ties to their countries’ militaries, secretive missions and beachheads in places where their governments have influence.

But the similarities stop there, according to defense analysts. 

The Chinese Communist Party’s fixation on centralized power leaves little room for private security firms to mount a military rebellion as Wagner did in Russia. The People’s Liberation Army is technically the party’s army, and the party demands absolute loyalty from all national security forces. Gun laws are so tight that few Chinese police officers carry weapons.

Unlike Wagner paramilitary fighting forces that are equipped for war, China’s security companies primarily handle guard duties that don’t require lethal weaponry. For more dangerous jobs overseas, China’s security companies function like consultants, hiring and managing local staffs who might be armed.

Still, Beijing’s broad definition of national security and its drive to infuse political priorities into commercial enterprises suggests to some analysts that it could expand the remit of private security firms. China has a history of covert use of commercial enterprises to achieve government aims, such as fishing boats that press territorial claims in regional waters and internet providers that assist in cyber espionage.  

“China could use private security companies as a platform for spreading its influence,” says Sergey Sukhankin, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington think tank. 

Sukhankin says such suspicions, coupled with fresh scrutiny of Wagner’s modest origins, might muffle the welcome Chinese security contracting firms receive from some governments. Despite a spate of attacks in Pakistan on Chinese nationals, Islamabad last year rebuffed Beijing’s overtures to dispatch private security agents, saying it could handle security within the nation.

The globalization of China’s economy has added to Beijing’s security concerns.

Now a decade old, Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road infrastructure development program spans ports, railways and dams worth billions of dollars across dozens of mostly developing countries. The construction, together with fleets of ships and aircraft that service the world’s largest trading economy, has created jobs for hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals as engineers and laborers in sometimes risky foreign locations. 

As the Chinese enterprises expand, Beijing has encouraged a go-global push by commercial security firms such as Huaxin Zhongan Group, China Huawei Security Group and Frontier Services Group’s DeWe Security. (Frontier, controlled by Beijing-based investment group Citic, was co-founded by Erik Prince, the American military contractor known for the firm formerly called Blackwater, though Frontier’s financial reports say he departed in 2021. Frontier didn’t immediately respond to questions.)

The bulk of each company’s business appears to be domestic—guarding office buildings and running armored cars—but all advertise the expertise of People’s Liberation Army special-forces veterans and experience securing Belt and Road projects outside China. 

Like symbols of American capitalism in some parts of the world, China’s international projects introduce enticing targets for thieves and terrorists who regard Beijing’s presence as neocolonial, say security analysts. 

Suicide bombers in Pakistan have killed, injured and threatened Chinese nationals, including three teachers last year whose deaths prompted diplomatic efforts by Beijing to enlist private security. Chinese road builders in Sudan have been kidnapped for ransom. In March, nine Chinese nationals were shot dead at a newly opened Central African Republic gold mine, which local authorities blamed on Wagner mercenaries. 

The demanding job of protecting Chinese nationals and investments abroad puts Beijing in a tricky position. Any impulse to respond directly is offset by a pillar of China’s international diplomacy: a pledge of noninterference in the domestic affairs of other nations. 

After the gold-mine rampage, Xi delivered vague instructions to protect Chinese nationals and bring the perpetrators to justice. But the government did little more than to reiterate a travel warning and urge the Central African Republic government to act.

“Beijing has witnessed firsthand how the sole reliance on economic development and the principle of noninterference could not completely shield Chinese workers and infrastructures from criminal and political violence,” Italian academic Alessandro Arduino writes in “Money for Mayhem: Mercenaries, Private Military Companies, Drones, and the Future of War,” a book set for publication in October. Arduino calls private security firms “gap filler” between maintaining the noninterference policy and a People’s Liberation Army presence.

Wagner has acted as a shadow Russian military in countries such as Syria, the Central African Republic and Mali, a mercenary force paid to defend governments Moscow wants to protect that also sometimes carves out for-profit side ventures.

By contrast, Chinese security firms are typically hired by other Chinese business groups, such as shipper China Ocean Shipping and China Road and Bridge, that seek protection for their own commercial interests. While such business groups are controlled by China’s government and often execute plans that serve Beijing’s political goals, their security interests tend to have only indirect links to the host government’s own stability, experts say.

Overseas, many Chinese companies present themselves as multinational commercial enterprises and play down the Communist Party’s role in their operations. But the security firms often do the opposite by publicizing party links.

“Wherever the security business extends, the party organization will be established,” said a statement posted last year to the website of Huaxin Zhongan. “The company has always taken political quality as the first element in the inspection and management of overseas armed escorts, and insisted on strengthening the party’s leadership of the escort team,” it said.

Huaxin Zhongan, which didn’t respond to questions, says on its website that 42% of its security guards, who mostly work in China, are retired soldiers and that all of its security staff based overseas are ex-military. In another post from this year describing escorts to help ships protect against piracy, one type of security work in which Chinese contractors have leeway to carry firearms, the company acknowledged it could only use such weapons with the party’s blessing. It said its officers have repelled pirates more than 40 times, saving customers millions of dollars in potential losses. 

The group’s Communist Party committee requires its overseas branch to “inherit our party and army’s glorious tradition of ‘the party commands the gun,’” the company said, adding that it should “take weapons management as a political task.”

Write to James T. Areddy at [email protected] and Austin Ramzy at [email protected]