China's Noncombatant Evacuation Operations: 2005–2025
Brief
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.