As China increasingly swells up with ambition to become the regional and global hegemon, its trojan-horse tactics of acquiring geopolitical leverage are correspondingly turning more evident and insidious. The country has, particularly under Xi Jinping, garnered international attention for its revisionist and expansionist manoeuvres along its borders and the South China Sea, as well as entrenching its surveillance state and intensifying systemic persecution of its religious minorities such as the Uyghurs and the Tibetans.

Recently, a June 2025 report by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies has uncovered in detail China’s deployment of hybrid or ‘grey-zone’ infrastructure which is constructed under the neutral garb of economic development but covertly serves as a geopolitical tool to ensure compellence or deterrence.

As opposed to being a new practice, the report highlights that major powers have long exploited infrastructure-based dependencies as a tool of geostrategic coercion. However, the scale of China’s activities and its impact on the affected countries makes it a unique case and one that must be monitored and checked. The report outlines three areas wherein this strategy of China can be observed- water, land, and the digital domain. For the first two, China has relied on its coercive control of Tibet to exploit its resource-abundant qualities and strategic location.

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