Beneath the glittering veneer of naval pacts and capacity-building initiatives, a quieter and far more tenacious form of power hums through the circuitry of Pakistan’s and Somalia’s emerging maritime partnerships with China. It is not the steel of ships or the signatures on MoU’s that shall endure, but rather the unseen web of digital systems such as satellites, sensors, and software that links both nations to Beijing’s orbit. Every radar pulse, every GPS fix, and every encrypted message is poised to travel through an ecosystem that shall be like a gearbox in an electric car. While it gives a sense of control, it’s purely decorative and perfunctory. China’s silent conquest of connectivity has found its willing conduits in Karachi and Kismayo.
What began as economic cooperation under the Belt and Road banner has evolved into a lattice of digital servitude—where national autonomy dissolves in the gentle hum of Chinese routers.
Pakistan’s seaward defences which were once defined by the physical heft of destroyers and submarines, now revolve around an invisible architecture supplied and sustained by China. At its heart lies the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, which serves as Beijing’s rather inferior alternative to the globally used American supplied GPS (Global Positioning System), and not quite-at-par with the home-grown Indian alternative for domestic usage with tactical independence, i.e. the NAVIC (Navigation with Indian Constellation) system. In 2025, Islamabad unveiled a six-point roadmap to harness the BeiDou system for everything in their arsenal, from logistics to port operations which meant that they had effectively handed over their naval coordination and missile timing to Chinese-controlled space infrastructure.
Around the same orbit of influence turn the PRSC-EO1 and PakSat-MM1R satellite systems, both developed with Chinese assistance. While they promise remote sensing and communications modernisation, phrases that, in the lexicon of defence, often translate to surveillance, targeting, and signal dependency, each upgrade grants the Pakistan Navy a lull of efficiency while draining the independence and sovereignty that a nuclear state may desire, with maintenance contracts, firmware updates, and calibration cycles controlled across the board from beyond the Himalayas with the technology arriving as glorified digital tether.
Huawei, omnipresent from Karachi’s port cranes to its coastal fibre networks, forms the terrestrial spine of this relationship. Port data flows through Huawei’s networks, monitored and maintained by technicians fluent not in Urdu but Mandarin. Even the rhetoric of local capacity building rings hollow when every node and protocol depends on Chinese approvals. Across the sea in Somalia, the pattern replicates with eerie precision. Earlier this year, a company linked to Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) was quietly named as the exclusive representative of Huawei, authorised to approve telecom infrastructure on Beijing’s behalf without parliamentary approval. Beneath the bureaucratic phrasing lies a very worrisome reality. Somalia, one of the countries that sits at the cusp of global maritime trade, shall have their digital sovereignty compromised and under a private monopoly that shall answers not to Mogadishu but to Huawei in Shenzhen and ultimately their masters in Beijing.
With Pakistan recently offering naval training and technical assistance to Somalia under the new defence MoU that was signed between the two, the convergence becomes complete. The systems Pakistan uses for navigation, communication, and monitoring are all Chinese, and the templates that it shall export will replicate those exact same dependencies, as Pakistan possesses neither the technology nor the intellectual capability to build their own systems for export, giving them a semblance of independence, as they continue to operate as a pawn on the 4-dimensional chess being played by Beijing. Somalia’s future navy, trained by Islamabad, which in turn is controlled by Beijing’s, shall have no option but to operate under the same digital ceiling that confines Pakistan.
Unfortunately, there are too many pawns in this elaborate game of geo-political chess, and by the time the countries realize that they are being played as pawns, they’ve reached the end of the line. The pattern is not isolated to South Asia or the Horn. In Kenya, Huawei’s Safe City systems interlace police, traffic, and intelligence networks through Chinese cloud architecture. Similar arrangements in Ethiopia and Tanzania tie surveillance, e-governance, and port management to Chinese-maintained servers. Each system arrives as aid, but, remains as infrastructure, impossible to uninstall without crippling national services. Technology, unlike loans, has no maturity date. When the groundwork is laid and satellites are aligned, control persists indefinitely through updates and security keys. China’s genius lies not in the coercive capture of states but in engineering irresistible convenience, and once the comfort of an established digital order is sold, there’s no going back, and it is that move through which progress festers into dependency.
There’s a very famous saying, “In politics, there’s no permanent friend, nor a permanent enemy.” For Pakistan, the cost of this convenience is strategic opacity. The navy’s operational integrity depends on foreign software that it cannot fully audit. A malfunction in BeiDou, or an unpatched vulnerability in Huawei firmware, or even the withdrawal of the Chinese government because it may not support a particular mission, as it may interfere with the economic interests of Beijing means a complete paralysis of command functions from Karachi to Gwadar, Baluchistan to Skardu. For Somalia, the danger is even more existential – a defence architecture conceived, built, and monitored by external hands can never evolve into an instrument of national self-determination.
Both countries stand at the threshold of a maritime future that looks indigenous only on the surface. Beneath the neural pathways of their defence and development, lies Beijing’s digital nerve centre. In this age of silent wires and whispering satellites, colonialism does not sail under foreign flags, it arrives as a software patch and an update.
(Ashu Mann is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies. He was awarded the Vice Chief of the Army Staff Commendation card on Army Day 2025. He is pursuing a PhD from Amity University, Noida, in Defence and Strategic Studies. His research focuses include the India-China territorial dispute, great power rivalry, and Chinese foreign policy.)