This study looks at Chinese investments in maritime infrastructures through the lens of ‘de-risking’ for the first time. It provides a comprehensive overview of Chinese investments in the European maritime sector over the past two decades and weighs the associated risks.
The study borrows the framework adopted by the National Risk Assessment of the Kingdom of the Netherlands 2022 for its risk assessment and further develops it to score the impact and likelihood of the investments across five major threat areas: EU-level dependency risk, individual dependency risk, coercion/influence risk, cyber/data risk and hard security risk. The analysis illustrates that the risks remain insufficiently understood by Member States, despite their high likelihood and/or impact. This is particularly true for economic coercion and cyber/data security risks.