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By Gordon G. Chang
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"There is absolutely no Chinese interference or involvement in anything that has to do with the Panama Canal," Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino said at a press conference on the 26th of last month. "There are no Chinese at the canal, no Chinese nor any other world power at the canal."
"There is not a single Chinese soldier in the canal," he added.
Mulino was responding to Donald Trump. On December 25, the president-elect posted this on Truth Social: "Merry Christmas to all, including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal."
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It's true there are no uniformed People's Liberation Army soldiers now stationed in the Canal Zone. That's not the end of the story, however. Almost certainly there are Chinese operatives and military personnel in civilian garb there. The Panama Canal is a chokepoint that Beijing seeks to control—and undoubtedly close off—in the moments before the next global war.
Trump was right, therefore, to highlight the issue in his Christmas greeting to China's atheists.
"Panama has a giant pork chop around its neck," war correspondent Michael Yon, now in the canal zone, told me this month. "It's called the 'Panama Canal,' and some hungry beast will want to take it." Trump expressed the same sentiment, saying America will never allow the waterway to "fall into the wrong hands," referring to China.
"Fall"? The canal zone—and Panama itself—has already dropped into China's basket, and the Chinese regime is certainly in a position to close off the waterway.
For instance, CK Hutchison Holdings, through its stake in Panama Ports Company, operates a port in Balboa, at the Pacific end of the canal, and in Cristobal, at the Atlantic end. Hutchison, therefore, is the biggest port operator in the zone. The Panama Maritime Authority renewed Hutchison's 25-year concession to the two ports in June 2021.
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Hutchison is nominally a private company in Hong Kong, but in the Communist Party's system, no entity in the People's Republic can ignore or disobey an order from the ruling organization.
In times of war, these facilities, even though privately owned, would be controlled by the People's Liberation Army.
"I was just in Panama about a month ago and flying along the Panama Canal and looking at all the state-owned enterprises from the PRC on each side of the Panama Canal," said General Laura Richardson, then head of the U.S. Southern Command, in July 2022 at the Aspen Security Forum. "They look like civilian companies or state-owned enterprises that could be used for dual use and could be quickly changed over to a military capability."
"There are numerous ways a knowledgeable actor such as the People's Republic of China, its companies, and agents could temporarily shut down the canal," R. Evan Ellis, professor of Latin American Studies at the U.S. Army War College, told me this month. "The risk does not come so much from the physical control of ports on both sides of the canal but rather the knowledge and access that comes from China's significant commercial and other activities across Panama."
The commercial presence, among other things, gives China bases from which to act. Moreover, China is embedded into the zone's infrastructure, including telecommunications systems supplied by Huawei Technologies as well as surveillance cameras and other equipment provided by Hikvision.
And then there is the fourth bridge over the canal, which China is now in the early stages of building. So far, as Yon reports, there are only abutments, but soon there will be a span over water. As the correspondent notes, the Chinese can design or construct the structure so that it can be easily collapsed.
"Let's recall," Yon said, "what happened when a container ship lost power and hit a pier of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore harbor last March. The port was closed off while cranes freed the ship and removed steel and concrete out of the channel. Now imagine what would happen if the Chinese rammed a bridge or a canal lock in Panama."
Canals are particularly vulnerable to accidents. In March 2021, for instance, the Ever Given, a container ship operated by the Evergreen line, ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal for six days. It's possible to similarly block the Panama Canal, especially at the narrow Culebra Cut, by scuttling a large vessel.
There are numerous other ways to shut down the canal, and American and Panamanian officials have both catalogued them and developed contingency plans. Unfortunately, these precautions are probably not enough. "As with terrorism, as the tragic events in New Orleans remind us, the greater the access and knowledge the adversary has, in a crowded transit space with numerous possible targets, the harder it is to protect against every contingency all the time," says Ellis.
There are, despite experienced canal zone pilots who steer ships through the canal, accidents in peacetime, as Yon reports. Just think how many "mishaps" there could be if some hostile party were trying to cause them.
The U.S. Navy, in anticipation of a war in East Asia, would use the canal to move ships and submarines from the Atlantic to the Pacific. An incident in the waterway, as Ellis warns, could be an early indication—perhaps the first one—that China intended to use force on the other side of the world.
Consequently, the next global war might start with an "accident" in Panama.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China's Project to Destroy America and The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on X @GordonGChang.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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