Putting a Price on Legitimacy: Private Security Companies, Critical Minerals, and China

David Cristiano Aguado, J.M. Lindstrom

The eight decades that followed the end of the "Century of Humiliation" taught China a clear lesson about its foreign conduct: the country's recovery of image and identity has never rested on militarism, but on adapting Confucian tradition to a new era and playing, with caution, patience, and persistence, the card that rules the world today, namely trade. Abundant labor and the development of complex industrial ecosystems propelled China into becoming the world's largest exporter and manufacturer. Yet Beijing also recognizes its own structural and geographic vulnerabilities, along with the opportunities that could offset them. This is precisely why the Belt and Road Initiative began taking shape in 2013, as a global infrastructure and trade-route development project spanning numerous regions, designed to extend Chinese dominance through commerce. As Eduard White (2026) reported for the Financial Times, total BRI deals rose to a record high of $126.3 billion in the first half of 2026, against a backdrop dominated by energy and natural resources.

When the economic volume at stake grows this large, protecting that commercial flow becomes essential, which raises an unavoidable question: how does a country defined by military non-intervention abroad protect infrastructure generating such high returns across other continents, and does that protection inevitably generate, through money alone, something no foreign armed force could ever purchase outright?

China's long-standing non-interference policy redirects its protection efforts for overseas infrastructure and citizens toward Private Security Companies (PSCs). The 2009 Regulation on the Administration of Security and Guarding Services requires, specifically for PSCs licensed to provide armed escort services, that they be "wholly state-owned or have state-owned capital accounting for at least 51 percent of their total registered capital" (Jiabao 2009).

The clearest examples of these PSCs are Frontier Services Group and DeWe. The former, founded in 2014 by Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater (now known as Academi) and an earlier investor in mining and oil ventures in Guinea and South Sudan (Fisher et al. 2018), now sits under the effective influence of CITIC Group, a conglomerate wholly owned by the State Council of the People's Republic of China, which holds an indirect stake of roughly 25 percent in the company's share capital (Frontier Services Group 2026). The CITIC subsidiary through which much of that commercial relationship runs is itself wholly owned by the State Council, confirming the underlying chain of state control even where FSG's own ownership remains partial. In 2017, FSG acquired a 25 percent stake in a Chinese security school, offering unarmed training in close protection and anti-kidnapping response while brokering the supply of armed personnel to licensed subcontractors (Martina 2017). As Aleksandra Virginski (2026) reports, the company is also involved in protecting billion-dollar copper mining investments in South Africa directly tied to the BRI.

A former Blackwater founder running a private firm, one which, like many of China's imperative firms for geopolitical influence, is in fact state-controlled, indicates that China is oriented around creating a private army the way the US developed Blackwater. FSG allows Beijing to outsource risk from direct governmental ties. The same pattern exists in the Chinese state-affiliated banks, mining and refining companies, research teams in the deep seas, and universities. If the government is able to utilize civil-military fusion not only in the companies extracting resources, but also to act as a private army-for-hire, then the CCP is able to take actions without geopolitical fallout. The nation, under the guise of a company, is able to act internationally as a military force; in the private sector, so that there is no loss of governmental legitimacy. Beijing struck against the US by absorbing private industry risks and costs in Balochistan; this is a reflection of the same strategy, wherein Beijing is insulated from its own actions by utilizing proxies in the form of private companies. Additionally, FSG is so high-risk due to the fact that it puts a Western face on a state security instrument; a private military company designed for combat without state affiliation.

DeWe, for its part, has completed roughly 3,000 training contracts with African partners and trained 70,000 of its own contractors, operating across the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, Djibouti, and Ethiopia (Ersozoglu 2021). In Kenya, it maintains more than 2,000 personnel guarding the $3.8 billion Mombasa-Nairobi railway, having first trained local forces along the line (Virginski 2026). In July 2016, it evacuated more than 300 workers from Juba in coordination with the South Sudanese government (Calabrese 2026), echoing a pattern already visible in 2012, when Chinese PSCs took part in rescuing 29 kidnapped workers in Sudan (Ersozoglu 2021). The establishment of these policies in the past indicates a pattern that is designed to repeat with the furthering of the FSG as a PFC; the trajectory provides a clear warning sign that China is seeking to defend its national interests with force. It starts with infrastructure and investment; it ends with a permanent army in the region. China's Global South initiative is built on the backs of weaker powers, such as those in Central Asia, to take advantage of what those nations need, while imposing what China requires from those nations. Securing such interests with force is only a natural progression of the same logic. At Blackwater USA's peak in Iraq, it deployed 1,000 contractors, while only 16 were stationed in Afghanistan. China, by contrast, possesses 70,000 contractors. 70 times the US PMC's involvement at its height.

These firms operate strictly according to a logic of profit and contractual ties with national and local governments, which means the legitimacy they acquire flows exclusively through state channels. This generates institutional dependency within the host state's security apparatus, which surrenders part of its sovereignty in exchange for resources or training, and in doing so becomes reliant on China, gradually eroding its own capacity for self-protection. Yet even where these PSCs present themselves as purely passive service providers, their conduct carries real weight for the local populations among whom they operate; as Valerio Fabbri (2022) documents, these communities are frequently exposed to abuse and mistreatment. Compounding this, the hiring or creation of local militias in the mining sector further erodes the security and authority of these states and feeds a mercenary culture long familiar across Africa (Fabbri 2022). Chinese extension of power through force in military units which possess the actual firepower the nation's government does not, provides a clear tool for Chinese influence. Here is a private army that is organized, controlled, trained, and powerful, in a nation which lacks organization of forces in the exact way the army provides. The roles of power and legitimacy are not only for international relations; they exist on the national level- the presence of a more powerful, more legitimate force occupying a majority of a nation is just that: an occupation. Security is only security until it progresses into force; a gun holds the same potential whether it is for defense or offense. Additionally, they work directly with local militaries and police forces, and likely are able to curry favor in such a way.

There is one notable exception to this expansion of Chinese PSCs. In Pakistan, China Overseas Security Group went so far as to form a joint venture with a Pakistani security firm tied to the Pakistani Navy, yet it is in Balochistan where China has run into resistance from separatists along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or CPEC (Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses 2025). Historically restive, Balochistan is the poorest region in the country despite being among the richest in energy resources and mineral routes, and it functions as an obligatory passage for the CPEC through Gwadar port (Paredes 2024). Chinese analysts strongly urged Beijing to deepen ties with local communities rather than dealing solely with the central government (Gibson 2020), but popular discontent, together with a rise in attacks on Chinese workers, many of them claimed by the Balochistan Liberation Army as a direct rejection of the Chinese presence in the region, served as a clear signal that Beijing needed to extend its negotiations beyond purely contractual arrangements with governments. As a result, China is now pressing Pakistan to demonstrate military authority to protect the CPEC, and its PSCs appear eager to establish a presence in the region, though no official confirmation of such deployment has yet emerged.

Beijing has pressed Pakistan to provide military protection, something which falls in line with Pakistani governmental authority and claims, the result is therefore China creating added pressure within a nation it is using as a host. This is not a reflection of a cap on the PSC model, but instead a reflection of China utilizing resources only where it has to. If there is no strategic benefit to deployment, and it instead reflects poorly upon the local government, and another nation, such would only serve to benefit China. The less legitimacy another nation has, the more leverage China has over that nation. The continued pressure on Islamabad has resulted in Pakistani deployment of troops to ensure the security of the extraction sites in Pakistan, nonetheless, Chinese PSC intervention elsewhere is present.

Ultimately, popular reception turns out to be just another variable in the equation of legitimacy. Outsourcing security to private firms is not a foolproof strategy, though neither is it easily broken. What matters, then, is recognizing that even when this legitimacy is built from above, it still requires the tacit consent of those below. Money alone cannot purchase legitimacy, nonetheless China has been able to purchase power and leverage, the tools of legitimacy. It is legitimacy which follows that power which bleeds into the international forum, which provides a worldwide influence that goes far beyond force. Beyond China, the role of private military and security companies, as well as private companies under national directions, reflects a tool that exists only in a globalized world. If the public and private sectors bleed into each other in international forums; if nations hide behind corporations, a concern quickly arises as to the determinants of legitimacy, and the risk of not a state running a corporation, but of a corporation running a state.

Notes & References