Meet the Former Chinese Official Now Running a U.N. Geospatial Tech Center

The man who runs a little-known United Nations office headquartered in China previously played a pivotal role in Beijing's campaign to sell other countries on its homegrown satellite positioning, navigation, and timing system ­— a technology that the Chinese military uses to guide its missiles and grow its influence in the developing world.

Li Pengde, a former Chinese official, has frequently talked up Beijing's plans for strategic dominance through China's Belt and Road Initiative and BeiDou, that global positioning network, a National Review analysis of media coverage and Chinese government reports found. He has also served for a decade as senior delegate to a Chinese-regime body at the heart of the Communist Party's far-reaching political influence system, an indication of his value to the regime.

In 2023, Li left his role in China's ministry of natural resources to run the U.N.'s new Global Geospatial Knowledge and Innovation Center (UNGGKIC) in the city of Deqing, which is less than an hour's drive from Hangzhou, a city known as a hub for major technology firms including Alibaba.

He and other U.N. officials have described the office — one of four such geospatial centers around the world — as a technical center that will share geospatial information processing innovations with developing countries.

"All these Centers are supporting aspects of the Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development," Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesman for U.N. secretary general Antonio Guterres told National Review in a statement.

"They are approved by the Secretary-General and fully funded by the host country. Their relationship with the United Nations is governed by legally binding documents, namely a Host Country Agreement and a Memorandum of Understanding." He also said that the Geospatial Center in China is overseen by an international advisory committee comprising senior geospatial experts from across the world.

It sits under the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, a social-development-focused arm of the U.N. that has been run by Chinese nationals since 2007. The geospatial center is the first office that the U.N.'s executive branch, called the secretariat, has opened in China. Chinese leader Xi Jinping first revealed the plan to open the facility in a 2020 speech to the U.N. General Assembly. Claudia Rosett, a renowned foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, reported on the plans to open the center that year, but Li's appointment to it, and his background, have gone largely unnoticed.

While many U.N. officials come from government service in their home countries, they are expected to swear an oath of impartiality upon joining the international organization.

But Li has outwardly continued to take Beijing's side on contentious geopolitical matters as an official for the U.N. During a U.N.-backed conference his center organized in Deqing last October, Li posed onstage with a topographical map of China that reflects the Chinese Communist Party's claims to Taiwan, with Beijing's infamous nine-dash line, a cartographical boundary that lays claim to wide swaths of the South China Sea, also visible.

A State Department official told National Review that Li's behavior is consistent with a 2018 interview in which Wu Hongbo, a former DESA undersecretary general, said that he would always put China's interests above all else at the U.N., clearly disregarding the impartiality oath.

"We don't view this as individuals acting as honest brokers," the official said, adding that Chinese-national U.N. officials are "first and foremost promoting the interests of the Chinese Communist Party."

Unlike U.N. officials of other nationalities, Chinese officials within the U.N. often reenter Chinese government service afterward. (Wu recently wrapped up a tour as China's special representative to Europe.)

Li's promotion of China's disputed territorial claims is consistent with the hard-edged nationalistic tendencies he exhibited during his decades in Chinese government service. He was the public face of Beijing's threats to deploy a survey team to islands administered by Japan but claimed by China in 2013 and led the crackdown on Coca-Cola's China presence after it was alleged to have illegally used satellite navigation capabilities.

Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, said that the creation of the UNGGKIC role was approved by a geospatial-information-focused subsidiary of the U.N. Economic and Social Council called the United Nations Global Geospatial Information Management Committee (UNGGIM). The management committee also supervises the center's work.

"Mr. Li Pengde is an internationally renowned Geo-scientist and was elected co-chair of UNGGIM for several annual sessions from 2014 to 2018. For the post of Director of UNGGKIC he was selected through a competitive process and reports directly to one of the Directors of UN DESA (Statistics Division)," Dujarric said.

When Li joined the U.N., Dujarric said, he “became a U.N. staff member subject to all our rules and regulations, including article 100 of the UN Charter which stipulates that 'In the performance of their duties the Secretary-General and the staff shall not seek or receive instructions from any government or from any other authority external to the Organization. They shall refrain from any action which might reflect on their position as international officials responsible only to the Organization.'"

"The UN is of course committed to ensuring that its staff, as international civil servants, adhere to all relevant UN staff rules," he added.

Beijing's efforts to use the U.N. to explicitly promote its interests is also consistent with how Chinese government entities talk about the center Li leads, which is situated within an industrial zone focused on encouraging the development of geospatial information technologies.

In a 2022 news release announcing the Geospatial Center's opening, the government of Deqing said that the U.N. facility would help Zhejiang province implement "dual circulation"— a Xi-era initiative that aims to boost China's technological self-reliance. The Deqing geoinformation industrial park hosts over 430 companies and research labs, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Microwave Characteristics Measurement Laboratory.

And Chinese government offices are already leveraging the U.N. center in Deqing to advance Beijing's strategic aims. During the October conference that Li convened under the auspices of his U.N. office, the Deqing county government signed an agreement with Tanzania's Ardhi University to establish a joint geospatial technology research center in the African country, according to the China Daily propaganda outlet.

"It's a tremendous source of influence with developing countries," Dana Goward, the president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for the U.S.-led GPS system, told National Review.

"Come in and tell them about maps and show them where things are, find out where their stuff is, so your companies will know. Geospatial includes stuff like mineral resource surveys and population mapping, and telecommunications, and electrical grids," he said, adding that that sort of information has important commercial, political, and military applications. Goward retired from the U.S. Coast Guard as a captain, served as the maritime navigation authority in U.S. government, and represented the U.S. at the International Maritime Organization and other U.N. bodies.

Kelley Currie, a former U.S. ambassador to the Economic and Social Council, said that "because party-state controlled enterprises are building out these systems," they have access to this valuable data.

"Xi Jinping has been very clear that 'data is the new oil' and having unfettered access to the most critical data of 120 developing countries is priceless. If you don't think Beijing is using this data for strategic purposes, you have not been paying attention," she added, linking China's promotion of "smart cities" and seabed mapping technology to the data collection effort.

The Geospatial Center remains a small office for now, but Li has high hopes for its future contributions. "The center's staff is not about the number, but about being able to unite the world's elites to make suggestions for development," he said in an interview during the October conference.

But Li's career history and public commentary provide ample reason to question whether he views the Geospatial Center as simply an altruistic effort to foster global development.

"The CCP wants to rewrite the rules to promote global censorship, erode individual human rights, restrict fundamental freedoms, export its authoritarian system, and provide its domestic industries with a competitive advantage," a State Department spokesperson told National Review.

"China's hosting and leadership of the U.N. Global Geospatial Knowledge and Innovation Centre is another example of Beijing placing CCP figures in U.N. leadership positions to export their authoritarian views within the international system."

A CPPCC Member 365 Days a Year

In a biography posted to the U.N. website in 2024, Li identified himself as a member of the standing committee of the Chinese People's Political and Consultative Conference (CPPCC) for ten years, during its 12th and 13th sessions between 2012 and 2022. During that time, he also served in China's natural resources ministry.

The consultative conference is a top body within the Chinese regime's united front system. That's the term for the Chinese-regime apparatus that "is involved in identifying the CCP's friends and enemies as well as organizing the party's friends to strike or isolate its enemies," Peter Mattis, a leading scholar of Chinese espionage and the president of the Jamestown Foundation wrote in a 2020 paper.

The House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party has described united front work as "a unique blend of engagement, influence activities, and intelligence operations that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses to shape its political environment, including to influence other countries' policy toward the PRC and to gain access to advanced foreign technology."

In a 2022 interview, Li implied that his role at the CPPCC is core to his identity and can't be subordinated to any other roles he might take on: "Since I am a CPPCC member, I should be a CPPCC member for 365 days."

He said that in his meetings with other geospatial experts at the U.N., he never forgot his identity as a CPPCC member and introduced the body's system to his international counterparts.

As a member of the consultative conference standing committee, Li was one of approximately 300 delegates chosen from a larger pool of the more than 2,000 influential people tapped to take part in national-level CPPCC sessions during his decade of service. At the U.N. conference in October, another member of the current CPPCC standing committee gave an opening address.

Li conducted visits to sites of technological importance in his capacity as a CPPCC standing committee member.

During one visit to the surveying and mapping bureau of Shaanxi — a province in northwest China known for holding vast coal reserves — Li led a delegation to a meeting at which he discussed several mapping projects within China. He also discussed how the country can collaborate more with foreign actors, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security grouping of authoritarian countries led by China, according to The Paper, a digital news outlet in China.

In an article published on the CPPCC's website, Li called for a renewed focus on securing international support for the Belt and Road Initiative. He said that Beijing should also promote "the idea of ecological civilization," writing: "Xi Jinping's idea of ecological civilization has Chinese characteristics, strategic vision and world value."

And he advocated for leveraging China's advantages in aerospace and geospatial technology and "realizing the internationalization" of BeiDou.

Spreading 'Chinese Wisdom'

Xi has labeled BeiDou, China's homegrown satellite positioning system, "one of the most important achievements China has made in the 40 years of reform and opening."

That's in large part because the People's Liberation Army views BeiDou as a tool that unshackled China's capabilities from possible U.S. interference through GPS.

"The 'unforgettable humiliation' of relying on America's GPS for military purposes during the 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis further fueled Chinese efforts" to develop the technology, a 2023 report from Harvard's Kennedy School assessed.

The Pentagon said in its 2024 report on Chinese military capabilities that China finalized its development of the service in 2020. The report found that it uses BeiDou's "high-accuracy" positioning and navigation services "to enable force movements and precision guided munitions delivery" and for command and control purposes.

BeiDou also has vast civilian applications across agriculture and efforts to monitor vehicles and ships, per the Pentagon.

Beijing is driving a campaign to sway foreign countries to adopt BeiDou, and that foreign adoption of the system comes with the benefit of further entangling those countries in China's commercial networks, military partnerships, and global regime of technological surveillance and control, according to the Harvard report.

"As BeiDou meets global PNT needs and BeiDou-linked infrastructure is sold abroad, Beijing reaps economic advantages and increases foreign political ties and potential leverage over other governments," the report concluded, using an acronym for positioning, navigation, and timing.

According to the Pentagon, "In 2021, the PRC predicted BeiDou products and services will be worth $156 billion by 2025 and be exported to more than 100 million users in 120 countries.

Currie called BeiDou "a classic example of China's 'dual use infrastructure' approach, whereby it develops a system or capability that has both commercial and military applications, deploys it across China-centric multilateral platforms like the Belt and Road Initiative or Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and advances its further application through specialized UN agencies working across the developing world."

"This approach gives the Chinese party-state, including the PLA, incredible global access and reach, even as it gets other countries to pay for building out this infrastructure through dept-trap diplomacy, strategic corruption and taking advantage of multilateral development financing," she said, using an acronym for the People's Liberation Army.

For over a decade, Li has spoken frequently and openly about his role in China's global BeiDou rollout.

During a U.N. conference in 2014, he told attendees that it was important to establish BeiDou monitoring systems in foreign countries, the China Daily CCP propaganda outlet reported at the time. "The system now covers the Asia-Pacific region, but by 2020 it will cover the whole world," he said.

Two years later, the China Daily quoted Li as saying that his government agency would work to improve its support of China's geospatial information industry, thus "presenting China a larger voice in the world."

In a 2017 interview, Li said that he believes that it is China's responsibility to share "Chinese wisdom" in the development of geospatial technologies with the developing world, considering the country's growing strength.

Asked how Li might approach his new job at the U.N., Goward said: "I think we can anticipate that he’s not going to stop encouraging people to adopt BeiDou and that he’s going to seek to further the China’s Belt and Road Initiative in terms of expanding their influence through trade routes and infrastructure and assistance to third world developing nations.”