"Tracking Chinese Investments in Overseas Industrial Parks", 30 Mar 2026, Council on Foreign Relations

Over the past three decades, Chinese private and state-owned firms have aggressively expanded overseas, building and financing factories, warehouses, logistics hubs, and industrial parks. This tracker documents 194 such projects worldwide.

When this tracker is read alongside our trackers on overseas ports and airports, a fuller picture emerges [...]. Chinese firms naturally gravitate toward places with easy access to markets, strong local demand, and infrastructure, such as ports and airports, in which Chinese entities have already invested. In other cases, industrial parks form one component of larger Chinese development packages that bundle infrastructure such as ports and railroads.

An interesting pattern in this data is Chinese firms’ appetite for emerging economies and middle-income countries [...]. The Belt and Road Initiative, for example, has targeted developing economies, and Chinese policymakers have consistently framed their overseas engagement as an expression of solidarity with countries in the Global South.

Some of the highest-profile projects in this dataset are industrial parks embedded within larger Chinese-financed port developments and special economic zones. Projects in Colombo (Sri Lanka), Gwadar (Pakistan), and Kyaukphyu (Myanmar) were designed from the outset to integrate industrial operations with port infrastructure, enabling direct trade links with China. [...].