Europe cannot protect what it cannot see

A personal lesson in strategic autonomy

Jaap van Etten opened by revisiting China's strategic decision in the mid-2000s to block the rollout of the superior European 3G standard (WCDMA) inside its borders. China accepted short-term technological disadvantages to guarantee long-term autonomy — a choice that ultimately secured its companies a seat at the global 4G and 5G standards table.

This example sets the stage for Europe: Europe's infrastructure has accumulated foreign dependencies not by design, but through years of incremental decisions. Today, we face a moment — much like China did in 2005 — where regaining resilience requires deliberate, strategic choices.

The expanding definition of strategic infrastructure

Traditional policy debates still focus on grids, telecoms, and transport. But modern infrastructure now includes far less visible layers:

These systems are gateways into Europe's economy, security posture, and societal stability — yet they fall largely outside existing oversight mechanisms. The result is a widening asymmetry: foreign actors understand Europe's digital and physical dependencies far better than Europe understands theirs.

A European grid asset with unmonitored defence ties

To demonstrate how quickly visibility can be lost, the testimony presented a real procurement example uncovered entirely through open public data.

A Central European grid operator tendered a battery energy-storage system — a critical asset for stabilising renewables. The winning consortium combined a European engineering firm with a major Chinese manufacturer: fully compliant, transparent, and 40% below expected pricing.

When the supplier's Chinese registration number was run through Datenna's platform, the picture changed within minutes. The manufacturer had also participated in several defence-sector procurements in China. Nobody was tracking this — it only became visible once procurement data was connected to broader industrial, research, and state-linked activity.

This does not imply wrongdoing. The risk lies in the architecture behind the product: firmware updates, diagnostic data, and remote-configuration functions for a European grid asset could flow through systems that also serve Chinese military applications — not because of any violation, but because the same industrial group operates in both domains.

"The question isn't only who a supplier was when they won the contract. It's who they become while they are operating our infrastructure."

Europe's blind spot: the scale of China's defence-linked ecosystem

Three numbers tell the story: 1,500 companies appear on global control lists. Include their majority-owned subsidiaries and that rises to 25,000 entities. But the underlying ecosystem is far larger: roughly 500,000 Chinese companies are directly or indirectly embedded in the defence-industrial ecosystem.

A single supplier can sit atop ownership chains, procurement networks, or research programmes that connect into military activity — even when the entity entering Europe appears commercial, benign, or newly established.

Greenfield investments: a structural oversight gap

A second example: a Chinese greenfield company in Europe participating in autonomous driving research, including licence plate scanning — a sensitive data function by any definition.

Yet no authority screened the company, because there was no legal requirement to do so. Subsequent analysis revealed direct ties to the Chinese government.

This is Europe's greenfield blind spot: new actors entering critical sectors without scrutiny, even when involved in data-rich domains such as LiDAR, charging infrastructure, or mobility systems.

Three recommendations to close the visibility gap

These measures are not about blocking investment: "It is about restoring information symmetry."

Economic security and national security are no longer separate domains. They are the same domain. And openness without visibility creates structural vulnerabilities Europe can no longer afford.