China: Technosphere provides a biweekly deep-dive into China’s technological control at home and influence abroad.
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Biweekly Feature: AI to Analyze the World’s Oceans
Key takeaway: Mingkun Technology has developed a maritime situational awareness system powered by large language models (LLMs) that integrates vast data sources to monitor military and civilian ships and aircraft across seas surrounding China. Its system supports Chinese military and government decision-making and is increasingly integrated with broader smart city and coastal surveillance platforms. Mingkun’s analytics underpin narrative and attribution efforts disseminated by SCSPI, which promotes pro-China interpretations of maritime activities in Southeast and East Asia.
Mingkun Technology, a Chongqing-based company, developed China’s first LLM, which helps entities, such as the 709 Research Institute of the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation (CSSC), military units, and other government agencies with maritime surveillance and decision-making. Mingkun’s system monitors the seas east and south of China, as well as the Taiwan Strait.1
With its maritime situational awareness system, Mingkun Technology keeps tabs on foreign war ship and airborne vehicles.
Mingkun’s LLM is powered by DeepSeek, Qianwen (Alibaba Cloud) and Doubao (ByteDance). Hence it appears that products from TikTok’s parent company are aiding China to get a comprehensive view of US war ships and airplanes in maritime Southeast and East Asia.
Figure 1: Mingkun Maritime Situational Awareness System (Source: Mingkun Technology)
Since Mingkun’s system is powered by an LLM, this means that it can respond to an analyst’s questions. If you ask the system:
“What is the latest location of the USS Nimitz?” it will produce location maps and its historical trajectory. Some more sample questions given by Mingkun include: What are the “[c]hanges in tanker traffic in the Strait of Malacca over the past week[?]” or “Are there any abnormal fishing vessel activities in a certain sea area of the East China Sea recently?”
Mingkun’s system fuses massive amounts of data, including from AIS (tech deployed on ships that allows them to be surveilled), ADS-B (tech on aircrafts that allows them to be tracked), radio frequency detection, five remote sensing image databases, news, and social media. Mingkun Marine Intelligent Agent tracks domestic and foreign ships and aircrafts, calculates their trajectory and provides early warnings around islands and reefs.
As Zhao Dengping (赵登平), a retired senior officer in the PLA navy said, this system should in the future expand in scope and integrate data such “as marine logistics, marine geology, marine fisheries, and marine transportation to continuously expand the system's service boundaries and application value.” In other words, Mingkun should soon fuse air, space, shore, sea and underwater data.
Figure 2: Zhao speaking at a Mingkun event in late 2025 (Source: Baidu)
Mingku’s ultimate goal is to provide “customized services for the maritime situation along the Belt and Road Intiative.”
Integrating ocean into land surveillance systems
Expect Mingkun’s LLM to be linked to companies that operate smart harbors, smart cities, or digital twins of the Chinese armed forces (see previous China: Technosphere issue). There is this tendency toward data integration in China, which may one day lead to a Chinese-run world digital brain, where cities, rural areas, the world’s oceans, civilian and military domains are all linked up into one system and displayed on a screen that processes data and deploys AI agents to steer processes.
Mingkun has already partnered with a coastal city to provide “smart coastal defense” to identify illegal fishing operation faster (for more on smart coastal defense see this previous China: Technosphere issue). This shows that ocean surveillance should not be seen as separate from city surveillance platforms, but rather as an extension of them.
Similarly as land based AI systems, maritime AI systems are seen as the “brain” that thinks. While AI systems covering land are called city brains, maritime brains would be their equivalent. While in cities CCTV cameras, people’s phones, and smart watches are the all-seeing eye, ocean recording devices include submarine detection systems and undersea cable sensors as well as satellites and airborne recording devices.
China is not the only one building martime situational awareness systems. The US-equivalents are the General Atomics EagleEye airborne radar and HawkEye 360’s satellite-based monitoring devices. A French company, unseenlabs, provides space-based monitoring too. While unseenlabs has already 20 of its own satellites deployed, Mingkun aims to launch its own satellite within the next 2-3 years. This could mean that Mingkun currently relies on other companies to collect some, if not all of the data it processes.
Company spotlight: Mingkun Technology (溟坤数科(重庆)智能科技有限公司)
Mingkun Technology is located at Building 6, No. 3 Kexiang Road, Hangu Town, High-tech Zone, Chongqing. It was spun out of the Chongqing Big Data Research Institute of Peking University and the Chongqing High-Tech Zone.
Similarly as in the cyber domain, China has started countering attribution narratives in the maritime domain. And Mingkun is providing the intelligence and maps for those attribution campaigns. Mingkun’s self-declared purpose is to predict an opponent’s actions and to use “international rhetoric to counter public opinion”.
And while Mingkun provides the analysis for attributions, the South China Sea Strategic Situation Awareness Initiative (SCSPI), serves as the platform for disseminating the pro-China narrative. The individual linking both Mingkun and SCSPI is Hu Bo, who serves as a director of both organizations.
Figure 3: Hu Bo is director of both Mingkun and SCSPI (Source: Mingkun)
Figure 4: South China Sea Strategic Situation Awareness Initiative website (Source: SCSPI)
SCSPI highlights for instance alleged movements of US Air Force and Australian Navy vehicles, as well as Vietnamese fishing boats in the seas south and east of China. SCSPI diligently provides satellite images of islands that have been occuppied by Vietnam and the Philippines, but of course it leaves out the problematic nature of Chinese-occupied islands in the Southeast and East Asian Seas.
Similarly as with the Lianyungang Forum (see previous issue of China: Technosphere), SCSPI is a vehicle for the dissemination of Chinese narratives. According to that discourse, the real maritime threat derives from other countries and not China. SCSPI is lobbying in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines to get its message across.
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The information presented in this biweekly brief is intended solely for informational and academic purposes. It reflects the author’s independent research, analysis, and opinions, and does not constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice.
While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy and timeliness of the content, no guarantee is provided regarding the completeness or correctness of the information. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own due diligence before drawing conclusions or making decisions based on this publication. The author disclaims any liability for actions taken or not taken based on the contents of this brief.
709’s parent company is sanctioned. 709 focuses on operating military computers, among other foci areas. One of 709’s campuses is in Wuhan’s Optics Valley, which is at the forefront of China’s embodied AI efforts.
