U.S. officials say the state-owned shipping giant has run concealed signals-collection equipment near foreign coastlines for decades, a claim surfacing weeks before the Trump-Xi summit.
Intelligence Lead
Two senior Trump administration officials told Reuters on 1 September that China's state-owned shipping conglomerate COSCO operates concealed signals intelligence equipment aboard its commercial vessels, intercepting military communications and encryption signals near the coastlines of the United States and other nations under a decades-long collection arrangement with Beijing. The allegation, unaccompanied by published technical evidence, surfaces weeks before Presidents Trump and Xi meet in Washington to negotiate trade and security issues, including the fate of stalled port fees targeting Chinese shipping firms. Beijing has flatly denied the claim.
Situation Report
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the U.S. assessment, said the arrangement allows China to collect communication signals from vessels and aircraft operating across Europe, North America, and Asia. The equipment is assessed to target "military communications technologies and encryption developments," according to one official, who described the systems as "sophisticated signals intelligence collection platforms, not routine communications hardware," though neither official detailed their form. The same officials said Beijing uses the collected data to bolster its position in territorial disputes and to provide maritime reconnaissance and early-warning indications of foreign military activity.
COSCO did not respond to Reuters' request for comment. China's embassy in Washington rejected the allegations outright, with spokesperson Liu Chang stating that Beijing would never direct a company to "collect or provide data, information or intelligence located abroad against local laws" and calling the reporting a baseless attempt to "vilify China."
China's 2017 National Intelligence Law obligates all organizations and citizens to support state intelligence work when called upon, and requires the state to protect those that comply. The Pentagon added COSCO to its list of companies linked to China's military in January 2025, a designation carrying reputational cost and procurement bans but no formal sanctions. COSCO nonetheless remains among the largest shipping lines calling at U.S. ports, with multiple container-terminal joint ventures embedded in American port infrastructure.
The allegation is consistent with a April 2025 China Maritime Studies Institute report from the U.S. Naval War College, which assessed that China's maritime militia, a nominally civilian fishing fleet with direct ties to the PLA and Chinese Coast Guard, likely embeds "information personnel" to collect and report military and political intelligence, and noted the practice may extend into commercial shipping. A 2021 U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Tearline Project report separately flagged COSCO's terminal at Belgium's Port of Zeebrugge for its proximity to a Belgian naval base.
Background & Context
The disclosure lands ahead of a planned Trump-Xi summit in Washington later this month, where the two leaders are expected to discuss a range of sensitive security and trade issues. A Trump administration plan to impose billions of dollars in port fees on Chinese shipping companies, including COSCO, aimed at reviving the U.S. shipbuilding and maritime industry, was paused after an October trade-war détente agreement between the two leaders. That agreement expires in November, and its possible extension is expected to feature prominently in the September talks.
The COSCO allegation follows a broader, well-documented pattern of China blurring civilian and military maritime roles, most visibly through its South China Sea fishing militia. It also parallels reporting on Russia's sanctions-evading "shadow fleet" of oil tankers, which multiple Western intelligence services have separately assessed to serve a secondary intelligence-gathering function alongside its primary sanctions-evasion role.
Isaac Kardon, an expert in Chinese maritime strategy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, noted that Washington would likely struggle to decisively address the alleged security risk given how deeply COSCO is woven into U.S. trade networks, warning that removing the company from American supply chains "could be life-threatening surgery."
Analysis & Assessment
Assessed with moderate confidence: the timing of the disclosure, arriving via anonymous officials weeks before a high-stakes bilateral summit, suggests Washington intends to use the maritime signals-intelligence threat as leverage in the upcoming trade and security negotiations, whether or not the underlying technical evidence is ever made public. The claim is plausible on structural grounds. It is consistent with China's National Intelligence Law, its documented maritime-militia practice, and comparable dual-use precedent from Russia's shadow fleet, but it remains uncorroborated by open-source technical evidence at the time of writing.
COSCO's depth of integration into Western port infrastructure, including terminal joint ventures at major U.S. and European facilities, makes any near-term regulatory countermeasure costly and politically fraught. This suggests the disclosure functions primarily as a diplomatic signal ahead of the summit rather than a precursor to imminent decoupling, though revived port-fee measures remain a plausible outcome if the détente extension talks falter.
More broadly, the COSCO allegation is one node in a widening pattern of nominally civilian dual-use maritime platforms, fishing militias, shadow-fleet tankers, and now container shipping, being leveraged by both Beijing and Moscow for intelligence collection. Allied navies and maritime domain-awareness programs should expect this convergence of commercial and intelligence infrastructure to deepen as both powers seek low-cost, low-risk collection platforms operating under legitimate commercial cover.