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Logistics is the new frontier of weaponised interdependence. China has the upper hand

China has treated its logistics platform as a strategic asset. India still discusses logistics data mainly as an efficiency question.

Geopolitical contestation has long manifested in battles for territory, resources, routes, access and influence. While the objectives of statecraft have hardly changed, the instruments through which they are pursued have. Almost anything can be weaponised with ease now. In this column, I make the case for attention to these new frontiers of geopolitical contestation.

One way to understand the present disorder is to separate three overlapping global orders: the security order, the economic order and the digital order.

The security order remains unipolar: the United States still possesses unmatched military prowess and power-projection capacity, even when that military power cannot decisively steer strategic outcomes. The economic order is more visibly multipolar, shaped by the leverage of the United States, China, the EU, assertive trade blocs and emerging markets.

The digital order is far more complicated. While Europe is a consequential third pole in regulation, competition in innovation, computing, AI and organising data at scale has hardened around the big two — the United States and China.

This third order is unique in that it cuts across the other two and is evolving fast. Data, standards, computing power and AI do not occupy a separate realm floating above geopolitics and geoeconomics. They increasingly determine who can manufacture efficiently, anticipate shortages, reroute supply chains, identify vulnerabilities and sustain military operations as precision weapons and AI play an ever-growing role in warfare. Whoever shapes the digital order is set to acquire disproportionate influence over both the economic and security orders. That is the paradigm shift.

No country has acted to gain an advantage on this front more systematically than China. Its rise cannot be explained only through cheap labour, subsidies, unfair practices, export promotion or the Belt and Road Initiative’s tally of completed and incomplete projects. Its greater, and mostly obscure, achievement has been the integration of industrial, infrastructure and data policies.

One of the clearest—and least discussed—examples is LOGINK, and just how early the CCP started building it.

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LOGINK—China’s National Transportation and Logistics Public Information Platform—had a humble beginning in Zhejiang in 2007 as an effort to standardise fragmented trucking and logistics information.

Within about a year, 15 provinces had joined LOGINK, and China’s Ministry of Transport drove a national rollout between 2009 and 2012. In 2010, LOGINK entered the Northeast Asia Logistics Information Service Network, linking Chinese, Japanese and South Korean ports. Standards work accelerated in 2013, the year Xi announced the BRI. In 2014, Beijing made international logistics-information exchange a formal policy priority, and by 2021 the integration of the logistics sector’s vast data troves was complete.

That chronology must be noted. LOGINK was not a digital prop added after China became the factory of the world. It grew alongside the effort to connect factories, trucks, warehouses, railways, customs agencies, ports and shipping companies into a coherent system that evolved with the digital revolution.

The platform can process vessel and cargo status, customs and inspection information, transit conditions, truck geolocation, bookings, freight-price inquiries, financing, insurance, billing and document exchange. It aggregates data from hundreds of thousands of users, millions of........

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