China rushed to evacuate thousands of workers from Libya on Thursday, after CNPC and other Chinese firms were attacked in the wave of unrest sweeping the country. Officials say 30,000 Chinese are in the country and the scramble to evacuate them—in what may be the country’s largest overseas evacuation ever—is posing a new foreign policy dilemma for China, which has for decades supported the Gaddafi regime.

CNPC, China’s largest oil and gas producer, said on Thursday that its facilities had been attacked and that CNPC employees were being evacuated back to Beijing. The statement is the first confirmation of attacks on oil companies, after oil majors such as Eni of Italy and Repsol YPF shut down their Libyan operations earlier this week. The violence in Libya poses a new test for China’s foreign policy in the region, which has centred around the concept of non-interference. That policy has become increasingly difficult to maintain as China’s commercial engagement with Africa deepens and Chinese workers decamp by the thousands to build infrastructure projects on the continent. Ma Zhaoxu, Foreign Ministry spokesman, acknowledged that some Chinese companies in Libya “had their local camp sites raided by gangsters and some people got hurt.” In an unusual statement on Tuesday, China’s President Hu Jintao ordered government workers to “spare no efforts to ensure the safety of life and properties of Chinese citizens in Libya.” China has dispatched charter flights, COSCO transport ships and Chinese fishing boats to travel toward Libya. Hired buses will also stand ready to enter Libya to help with the evacuation if necessary, the foreign ministry said. The forced evacuation of such a large group of overseas Chinese has exposed one of the new vulnerabilities of China’s foreign policy as its interests expand rapidly around the globe. There are now tens of thousands of Chinese migrants working in potentially volatile places such as Sudan, Congo, Burma and Pakistan. Chinese diplomats worry that high-profile cases of kidnapping or violence towards Chinese workers overseas could provoke nationalist reactions at home and push the government, which prides itself on a policy of non-intervention, to become much more involved in the domestic political affairs of crisis-ridden countries.