Over the past two decades, noncombatant evacuation operations (NEOs) have emerged as an important tool for protecting China’s overseas interests. To assess China’s NEO capabilities for the US Army War College China Landpower Studies Center’s 2026 Carlisle Conference on the PLA (People’s Liberation Army), Insikt Group built an original dataset of 37 Chinese NEOs carried out between January 2005 and August 2025. This blog post has been adapted from Insikt Group’s conference paper, and our “China 2005–2025 Noncombatant Evacuation Operation Dataset� is attached as a PDF.

One of Insikt Group’s most notable findings is that, over the past twenty years, China has consistently mobilized civilian resources to facilitate NEOs, demonstrating China’s reliance on these resources for NEOs and its capability to call upon diverse instruments of national power to protect overseas interests. During this period, at least 65% of China’s NEOs involved support from Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), private enterprises, or United Front/civil society organizations located in the host country, third-party countries, or China. The contributions of SOEs, private enterprises, and United Front/civil society organizations to China’s NEOs include:

• Organizing evacuation efforts on the ground


• Communicating official instructions


• Providing air, land, and maritime transportation


• Providing relief to evacuees once they arrive in neighboring countries or return to China-

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese government have continued to take advantage of civilian resources for NEOs since August 2025 — such as for its Iran NEO in early 2026 — and will almost certainly continue to mobilize these resources in the future.