Four years ago, the United States warned that China was poised to unleash a trade superweapon: a state-backed digital dragnet that would rapidly expand across the globe and give Beijing unprecedented insight into the flow of international cargo.
The LOGINK platform promised to streamline global shipping by providing a digital system to exchange logistics data from customs authorities, ports and third-party transport services, replacing paper processes.
Instead, the venture suffered a stunning reversal, reported here for the first time. Its flagship global partnerships have stalled, it dropped out of an international maritime association, and it has become mired in domestic lawsuits over unpaid bills, according to interviews with more than 20 shipping industry insiders and officials, as well as a Reuters review of legal filings.
When a reporter visited LOGINK’s operations hub in the coastal city of Wenzhou in September, the offices appeared abandoned: lights off, reception bare, computer cabling stripped out.
Calls and emails to LOGINK went unanswered. China’s transport ministry declined to answer questions. The ministry in June, however, issued a policy document calling for the system to be connected to more domestic data streams.
LOGINK’s international retreat is a setback for Beijing, which has been engaged in a battle with Washington to control the physical infrastructure and technologies underpinning global shipping, a sector that carries 80% of world trade. The platform’s decline will be welcomed by the US, which contributed to LOGINK’s reversal in fortunes by “naming and shaming” those who used the system, said Randall Schriver, chair of a US Congress commission that issued a report on LOGINK in 2022.
Reuters could not establish why the platform championed by China’s cabinet as a “key project” abruptly went dark and spiraled into financial and legal troubles. The timing of its retreat, however, coincided with US efforts to pressure allies and organizations that had made tentative steps to collaborate with LOGINK as it pushed for global expansion.
US officials and security experts worried that Beijing could use the system to gather non-public information on traded goods, volumes and pricing to help Chinese firms undercut Western rivals. Some also feared that LOGINK could be used to track sensitive military shipments, including US arms deliveries to Ukraine and Taiwan, many of which move through commercial freight networks.
LOGINK has not publicly disclosed the exact nature and scale of the data it collected. In a submission to the US Trade Representative’s Office in 2024, LOGINK official Li Zhao said that it lacked “the capacity to collect sensitive commercial information or to continuously monitor global cargo movements.”
A US State Department spokesperson did not provide specifics when asked about its diplomatic efforts to curb global use of LOGINK, but said that Washington would not allow a platform controlled by Beijing to “gain a chokehold over global maritime data.”
“We have prohibited its use across our own government and critical port infrastructure, and we urge allies and industry to take this threat with the same seriousness,” the spokesperson added.
FROM TRADE SOLUTION TO HAZARD?
LOGINK is formally known as the National Transportation and Logistics Public Information Platform. It started two decades ago as a local government project in China’s Zhejiang province to improve coordination of cargo movements by bringing data from ports, trucks and vendors into a single searchable platform.
The platform won the backing of policymakers in Beijing, who soon after transferred control of LOGINK to China’s transport ministry. International expansion quickly became a priority.
In 2010, China struck a cargo data-sharing deal with the Japanese and South Korean governments that linked LOGINK to their national logistics information platforms.
A few years later, LOGINK signed an agreement with a Hong Kong-based logistics platform that the Chinese entity said in a press release would give it access to “more than 90% of global ship tracking data.”
LOGINK will be a “one-stop portal connected with global logistics information systems,” according to a 2015 Chinese transport ministry presentation to a United Nations commission which was posted online.
By the late 2010s, LOGINK was also exploring ways to collaborate with European ports. But in 2022, US policymakers started publicly pushing back on the Chinese platform.
A turning point came that April, when LOGINK signed up to an international data-sharing project linking operators of digital platforms that facilitate the exchange of cargo and customs information at ports.
LOGINK’s participation in that project would double its cooperation with international ports, according to the US commission’s report.
A few months later, a group of Republican lawmakers urged then-US president Joe Biden in an open letter to act against LOGINK. Among them was Marco Rubio, now Trump’s Secretary of State.
Unchecked expansion of LOGINK could allow the Chinese Communist Party “to gain a stranglehold on the arteries of global trade,” they said.
One of the lawmakers, then-Representative Michelle Steel, in late 2023 also asked the International Port Community Systems Association (IPCSA), which spearheaded the data-sharing project, to immediately cut its ties with LOGINK.
Congress at around that time additionally passed a law prohibiting the Pentagon from entering into contracts with LOGINK-connected entities. The law also directed officials to dissuade allies and partners from using the platform.
Officials in Seoul and Tokyo who collaborated with LOGINK, however, told Reuters that the scope of data-sharing was more limited than some in Washington feared.
South Korea’s Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries and Japan’s transport ministry said that only vessel arrival and departure times and information on cargo loading and unloading were made available, not details on cargo contents.
GOING DARK
Then, LOGINK beat a retreat.
The platform’s participation in IPCSA ended in 2024 after it stopped paying its membership dues, according to a person familiar with the matter.
LOGINK’s website went dark around that time. The latest available scrape on the Wayback Machine archive dates to June 2024.
IPCSA General Manager Inga Morton confirmed that LOGINK was no longer a member and said that the international data-sharing project was “on hold and inactive”.
Meanwhile, China’s service with South Korea and Japan that was LOGINK’s flagship international initiative has also faltered. Participants from the three countries have held regular meetings since the service’s launch, but China abruptly canceled an event scheduled for March 2024, citing “internal circumstances,” according to South Korea’s oceans ministry. No meetings have been held since.
Tokyo’s access to LOGINK data via that service later stopped without notice, a transport ministry official said. The official told Reuters in August that Japan had lost access more than a year earlier and that Tokyo had been unable to contact Chinese counterparts.
The Chinese venture also had little to show for its efforts to expand into Europe.
Ana Rita Rosa, a spokesperson for the authority governing Sines, Portugal’s largest port, told Reuters that a memorandum of understanding it had signed with LOGINK in 2017 to explore data-sharing led to no significant outcomes.
