The Sky Has an Owner
- Alice Maria Pastorino
- Jun 9
- 10 min read
How China's Thousand Sails are taking over Southeast Asia's digital sovereignty
In February 2025, a quiet but consequential signing ceremony took place in Kuala Lumpur. Executives from Shanghai Spacesail Technologies Co. Ltd., the firm behind China's Qianfan constellation, also known as SpaceSail, shook hands with Malaysia's MEASAT Global Berhad, one of Southeast Asia's most established satellite operators. The memorandum of understanding covered low-Earth orbit broadband services, direct-to-device communications, and satellite-based Internet of Things solutions. In isolation, it might have read as a routine industry deal. In context, it was the opening move of a deliberate strategy to make China the backbone of Southeast Asia's digital sky, specifically in the markets where Washington's preferred alternative, SpaceX's Starlink, was losing ground.
The Qianfan constellation, whose name means 'Thousand Sails' in Chinese, is China's most ambitious low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite project to date. Developed by Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST), a firm backed by the Shanghai municipal government and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it aims to deploy over 15,000 satellites by 2030. As of May 2026, more than 500 satellites are already in orbit following a series of batch launches using Long March rockets from Taiyuan. By any metric, it is the most credible alternative to Starlink ever brought to market. And it is Southeast Asia that Beijing has identified as the critical first arena.
To understand what is at stake, it is not enough to think of this as a satellite story. Rather, it is necessary to grasp how satellite choice is rapidly becoming an expression of geopolitical alignment, what it means when the infrastructure of digital sovereignty is built by a rival great power, and why ASEAN countries are neither passive recipients nor simply naive. The decisions being made in telecom ministries across Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Jakarta today will shape the architecture of the regional digital economy for decades and neither Beijing nor Washington seems to fully grasp that the region is driving a hard bargain.
治水者治天下 - "He who controls the water controls the valley"
Southeast Asia's digital divide is both well-documented and consistently underestimated by outside observers. As of early 2025, internet penetration across the region stood at approximately 70 percent, meaning that roughly 210 million people remain without meaningful access to reliable connectivity. This figure, however, conceals enormous internal variation. While Singapore approaches near-universal coverage, countries like Myanmar, Cambodia, and the rural interiors of Indonesia and the Philippines lag far behind. The consequences are not merely developmental: they represent a structural market opportunity for whichever constellation can move fastest and cheapest into those gaps.
This is where Qianfan's strategic positioning becomes clear. SpaceSail is engineered, from the ground up, to compete on price and coverage in exactly these underserved contexts. By orbiting at roughly 1,160 kilometers, its satellites achieve broad geographic coverage while maintaining latency (approximately 60 to 70 milliseconds), as demonstrated in a trial at Hong Kong's Victoria Harbor, showing they are competitive with consumer-grade 4G and 5G networks. SSST positions its constellation not merely as a broadband provider, but as an enabler of smart agriculture, disaster management, ocean logistics, and emergency communications: the very applications that resonate most with governments trying to digitize rural territories.
SpaceSail's commercial diplomacy in the region has been methodical. Beyond the MEASAT deal in Malaysia, the company formalized cooperation with Thailand's National Telecom Public Company Limited in April 2025 and has reached agreements with Brazil's state-owned TELEBRAS. Connectivity tests have been completed in Malaysia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, with results described by SSST's chief technology officer as demonstrating stable video streaming and video calls. At the Singapore Airshow in February 2026, SpaceSail signed a further memorandum with Panasonic Avionics, a California-based subsidiary of Japan's Panasonic, to explore in-flight connectivity across the Asia-Pacific, in addition to an earlier agreement with Airbus for its High Bandwidth Connectivity Plus program. The role of these industry giants suggests that SpaceSail's credibility cannot simply be dismissed as aspirational marketing anymore.
Meanwhile, China's broader Space Silk Road strategy, encompassing SpaceSail alongside the separately developed Guowang state constellation (targeting over 13,000 satellites), frames satellite connectivity explicitly as an extension of Belt and Road digital infrastructure. Beijing positions these constellations as mechanisms to connect the global digital divide, a framing that plays well in Southeast Asia and that carries the implicit offer of dependency-lite development financing. ABI Research forecasts that China's addressable market for satellite direct-to-cell services could reach approximately 30 million users by 2030. The number of active satellites launched by Chinese operators is projected to grow from around 17,000 in 2025 to over 48,000 by 2032. The scale of ambition is, frankly, extraordinary.
鹬蚌相争，渔翁得利 - "When the snipe and the clam fight, the fisherman wins"
Starlink arrived in Southeast Asia first and, in purely technical terms, has clear advantages: in particular, it currently has a larger operational constellation and a more established user terminal ecosystem. The Philippines and Malaysia both licensed Starlink in 2023-2024; Indonesia followed in May 2024. Vietnam approved a controlled pilot as recently as April 2026, capped at 600,000 subscribers and requiring four domestic gateway stations, a sovereignty-preserving condition that illustrates both the demand for and the anxiety around foreign satellite infrastructure.
But Starlink's expansion has been complicated in ways that are only tangentially related to technology. Elon Musk's political prominence under the second Trump administration has generated significant friction across the region. In Malaysia, calls to boycott Tesla emerged in early 2025 following Musk's public support for Trump's Gaza relocation proposal, and SpaceSail's MEASAT deal was signed in almost precisely this window: a timing that Rest of World's reporting characterized as deliberate. In Brazil, Starlink's bank accounts were frozen by a Supreme Court judge after SpaceX defied content-moderation rulings; SpaceSail moved to sign its own deal with TELEBRAS within months. The pattern is clear: Beijing is advancing Qianfan systematically into markets where Starlink is generating political friction, and it is doing so with the explicit backing of the Shanghai municipal government: a reminder that SpaceSail is not a purely commercial actor but an instrument of Chinese industrial statecraft.
The geopolitical stakes of this dynamic are substantial and go far beyond market share. Submarine telecom cables currently carry approximately 99 percent of international data traffic, and satellites (even LEO systems) cannot substitute for cable infrastructure at scale due to cost and capacity constraints. What satellite internet provides instead is what analysts call a 'resilience and reach layer': connectivity for the places and people cable cannot serve, and a backup layer when cable fails. In a region as archipelagic and disaster-prone as Southeast Asia, that layer matters enormously. And the question of who owns and operates that layer is precisely what determines digital sovereignty in the twenty-first century.
竹彎而不折 - "The bamboo bends but does not break"
The conventional framing of SpaceSail's advance in Southeast Asia tends toward alarm: China is building digital infrastructure that will monitor users, route data through Beijing, and entrench dependency in countries already navigating difficult relations with a powerful neighbor. Instead, the actual behavior of Southeast Asian states reveals something considerably more nuanced: a set of governments that are neither naively embracing Chinese infrastructure nor reflexively rejecting it, but are actively using the competition between SpaceSail and Starlink as leverage.
Vietnam's April 2026 Starlink pilot is instructive. The domestic gateway requirement – four stations across three locations – is explicitly framed in terms of cybersecurity compliance and spectrum sovereignty. It does not reflect an open-door approach to American infrastructure; it reflects Hanoi's determination to extract sovereignty-preserving conditions from whatever foreign operator it licenses. Indonesia has imposed similar conditions in its deliberations, emphasizing that any satellite operator must comply with data localization requirements and national cybersecurity frameworks. Interestingly, Indonesia's SATRIA-1 satellite, operational since 2024 and already connecting over 30,000 public service points by late 2025, gives Jakarta a degree of domestic leverage that smaller neighbors lack.
Malaysia's approach is perhaps the most strategically sophisticated. By signing with MEASAT, a national operator with deep regulatory relationships and technical expertise, SpaceSail is enabling Malaysia to integrate Chinese LEO connectivity into its existing national infrastructure, with MEASAT serving as a buffer to retain domestic operational control. But Malaysia's long-standing approach to Chinese BRI infrastructure is not accidental.
The implications for ASEAN as a collective body are not as encouraging. The bloc's 'centrality' principle – the idea that ASEAN should remain at the center of regional architecture, beholden to no single great power – is structurally ill-suited to the kind of binary infrastructure decisions that satellite connectivity increasingly requires. Unlike trade agreements or diplomatic communiqués, satellite systems are not easily made ASEAN-neutral: a region's devices either route through Chinese-controlled ground infrastructure or through American-controlled infrastructure. The Artemis Accords, which Singapore signed in 2022, Thailand in 2024, and both Malaysia and the Philippines in October 2025, represent one attempt to assert ASEAN countries' alignment with Western norms in space governance. But the Accords govern exploration and debris mitigation, not commercial broadband routing. They are an insufficient answer to the question SpaceSail is actually posing.
There is also a corporate dimension that receives insufficient attention in policy discussions. Multinational firms operating across Southeast Asia (in logistics, finance, manufacturing, and healthcare), are beginning to encounter satellite connectivity as a compliance variable. A regional warehouse network that relies on Qianfan for remote-site communications in northern Thailand or eastern Indonesia implicitly routes operational data through infrastructure subject to Chinese cybersecurity law, including the 2021 Data Security Law and the 2017 National Intelligence Law, which can compel Chinese companies to provide access to state authorities. This is not a theoretical risk; it is a regulatory reality that international legal and compliance teams will increasingly need to incorporate into supply chain risk frameworks.
千里之行，始於足下 - "A thousand-mile journey begins with the ground beneath your feet"
Where does this leave us? The optimistic reading, which holds that Southeast Asian countries will successfully pit SpaceSail and Starlink against each other, extract favorable terms from both, and maintain strategic autonomy, is not implausible. History offers lessons: the ASEAN states have, with varying success, balanced Chinese infrastructure financing and American security guarantees for decades. The pessimistic reading is that satellite infrastructure is qualitatively different from roads or ports, because the dependency it creates is invisible, pervasive, and extraordinarily difficult to unwind once established. A country whose rural connectivity layer runs on SpaceSail cannot easily migrate to an alternative when political relations deteriorate.
The current trajectory suggests that the region is heading for a messy, uneven patchwork: some countries, like Vietnam and Indonesia, will impose gateway and localization requirements on both operators; some, like Malaysia and Thailand, will integrate SpaceSail through national intermediaries; and some others, like the Philippines and Singapore, will lean more heavily toward Starlink and Western-aligned systems. This fragmentation is, in a way, exactly what ASEAN's diversity would predict. But it also means there will be no regional digital sovereignty framework: no ASEAN-level standard for what conditions foreign satellite operators must meet, no shared data governance architecture, no collective bargaining position.
Several concrete steps would reduce the risks without requiring ASEAN countries to reject SpaceSail outright, an unrealistic demand given the connectivity dividends at stake. First, governments should follow Vietnam and Indonesia's lead in mandating domestic gateway infrastructure as a condition of any satellite broadband license, regardless of operator nationality. This preserves jurisdictional oversight of data routing without sacrificing connectivity gains. Second, ASEAN should establish a technical working group drawing on the existing ASEAN Digital Masterplan 2025 institutional framework, specifically focused on LEO satellite governance standards, including data localization, spectrum management, and orbital debris mitigation. Third, the private sector, particularly multinationals with significant ASEAN exposure, should begin incorporating satellite infrastructure provenance into their supply chain risk assessments, in the same way that 5G supplier nationality became a compliance consideration after the Huawei controversy.
The counterfactual is worth confronting directly: what if Qianfan succeeds not because ASEAN governments made a strategic choice for China, but simply because SpaceSail arrived on time and Starlink kept generating political friction? The MEASAT deal, the Thailand National Telecom agreement, and the Airbus partnership all suggest that SpaceSail's commercial momentum is real and accelerating. SpaceSail reported no revenue and a net loss of approximately 4 billion yuan as of November 2025. This is a reminder that the commercial model remains unproven, yet with the Shanghai municipal government and national-level funds, the project can absorb losses at a scale no commercial competitor could match. Starlink's path to profitability took six years of deployment, Beijing’s will be faster.
未雨绸缪 - "Mend the roof before the rain comes"
TThe Thousand Sails are already in the sky above Southeast Asia, and more are coming. The question is not whether China will have a significant presence in the region's digital infrastructure, because it will. The question is whether Southeast Asian governments, international businesses, and Western policymakers understand that the decisions being made right now in telecom ministries and satellite licensing committees are not routine regulatory proceedings but rather the strategic choices of a new digital order. In fact, ASEAN states have, historically, proven more adept than outsiders credit at extracting value from great-power competition. Whether they can do so in a domain such as infrastructurally consequential, technically complex, and invisible to the public, will be one of the defining tests of the Asian continent in the decade to come.
In February 2025, two sets of executives shook hands in Kuala Lumpur and called it a business deal. But they were wrong: it was a constitutional moment, and the question now is whether anyone in the region is treating it like one.
Bibliography
ABI Research. (2025). Satellite direct-to-cell addressable market forecast, Asia-Pacific. ABI Research.
Baptista, Eduardo (August 6, 2024). China will launch first satellites of constellation to rival Starlink, newspaper reports. Reuters
Center for Strategic and International Studies. (2025, December 2). Strategic implications of the PRC's mega-constellation initiatives on Southeast Asia. CSIS.
Connectivity.technology. (2025, November 13). China's growing constellations, ambitions and the future of satellite broadband. https://www.connectivity.technology/2025/11/chinas-growing-constellations-ambitions.html
East Asia Forum. (2024, August 6). Indonesia's Starlink expansion must balance connectivity and security. https://eastasiaforum.org/2024/08/06/indonesias-starlink-expansion-must-balance-connectivity-and-security/
Geopolitical Monitor. (2026, May 14). Vietnam's Starlink pilot and digital sovereignty in Southeast Asia. https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/vietnams-starlink-pilot-and-digital-sovereignty-in-southeast-asia/
Jones, A. (2025, February 7). Chinese constellation operator Spacesail signs agreement with Measat of Malaysia. SpaceNews. https://spacenews.com/chinese-constellation-operator-spacesail-signs-agreement-with-measat-of-malaysia/
Liao, R. (2025, March 31). China's SpaceSail is expanding where Elon Musk faces friction. Rest of World. https://restofworld.org/2025/chinas-spacesail-is-expanding-where-elon-musk-is-stumbling/
Wan, W. (2026, March 11). China's SpaceSail seeks fresh funding to build rival to Starlink. Caixin Global. https://www.caixinglobal.com/2026-03-11/chinas-spacesail-seeks-fresh-funding-to-build-rival-to-starlink-102421921.html
Xinhua. (2025, December 12). China's commercial satellites accelerate global connectivity. https://english.news.cn/20251212/00b310c1e30e40869389a38783d506b8/c.html
Zhang, Emily. SpaceX's Dark Satellites Are Still Too Bright for Astronomers. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacexs-dark-satellites-are-still-too-bright-for-astronomers/
Comments