Latest arena for China’s growing global ambitions: The Arctic
ROVANIEMI, FINLAND — The Arctic is thawing, and China is seizing the chance to expand its influence in the north.
For China, the retreating ice potentially offers two big prizes: new sources of energy and a faster shipping route across the top of the world. To that end, the country is cultivating deeper ties with Russia.
More than 5,000 kilometres from home, Chinese crews have been drilling for gas beneath the frigid waters of the Kara Sea off Russia’s northern coast. Every summer for the past five years, Chinese cargo ships have manoeuvred through the ice packs off Russia’s shores — a new passage that officials in Beijing like to call the Polar Silk Road. And in Shanghai, Chinese shipbuilders recently launched the country’s second icebreaker, the Snow Dragon 2.
China’s ambitions in the Far North, said Aleksi Harkonen, Finland’s ambassador for Arctic affairs, mirror its ambitions everywhere else. “It’s after global influence,” he said, “including in the Arctic.”
The China-Russia partnership advances both countries’ agendas in the region, at least for now. It also comes against a background of rising hostilities between China and the United States over issues such as trade, territorial claims and allegations of espionage.
That tension is spilling over into the Arctic.
In April, the Pentagon, in its annual report to Congress on China’s military power, included for the first time a section about the Arctic and warned of the risks of a growing Chinese presence in the region, including the possible deployment of nuclear submarines in the future.
And this month, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used a meeting of foreign ministers here in Rovaniemi, several kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, to assail China for what he called its “aggressive behaviour” in the region and pointed to Beijing’s actions in other parts of the world.
His comments earned the diplomatic equivalent of an eye roll from many of the delegates in the room, and analysts who follow Chinese activities in the Arctic said Pompeo overstated the nature of Chinese activities in the north. China has no military presence in the Arctic, nor any territorial claims. Its activities are commercial and scientific, for now.
But Beijing has much to gain, strategically, in a warming Arctic, and it is focused on the long game. Wealthy and ambitious, it can afford to be.
China is trying to pour money into nearly every Arctic country. It has invested billions into extracting energy from beneath the permafrost on the Yamal Peninsula in northern Russia. It is drilling for gas in Russian waters alongside the Russian company Gazprom. It is prospecting for minerals in Greenland. And its telecommunications giant is eager to partner with a Finnish company that wants to lay a huge new undersea internet cable to connect Northern Europe with Asia.
The approach is not entirely new. China struck a free trade deal with Iceland six years ago, giving tiny Iceland a giant market for one of its main exports: fish. A Chinese company proposed to partner with Greenland in rebuilding airports, prompting Denmark to step in and underwrite the project instead. Another Chinese company proposed to build a port for Sweden, but backed out amid fraying diplomatic relations between the two countries.
“Arctic countries can’t say no to investments. That’s clear,” said Harkonen, the Finnish diplomat. “We want to be sure we know what China is after.”
In addition, Chinese ships are sailing the Northern Sea Route. The state-owned China Ocean Shipping Co. has sent its cargo vessels across the Arctic multiple times over the last five years and is planning more voyages this summer. A company official told a recent Arctic affairs meeting in Shanghai that the northern route cut 10 days off a trip from Asia to Europe compared with routes through the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal.
Climate change is opening up that shipping lane for longer stretches of the year. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the global average, with the average extent of Arctic sea ice reaching a new low this April, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, China is partnering with the leading expansionist power in the region: Russia, which sees the Arctic as key to its future wealth and power.
It is an increasingly vital relationship for both countries. Russia needs Chinese investment to extract the natural resources under the permafrost and monetize its long Arctic coast, especially after the United States imposed sanctions over Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
And so, Russia’s one-time wariness of competition in the Arctic has given way to a new openness with China.
“Though Russia and China would be natural competitors for Arctic resources and influence, they have started co-operation knowing that only together they can out-compete the West,” said Agnia Grigas, an energy expert in Washington and author of a recent book on natural gas and geopolitics. “China’s need for energy sources and Russia’s economic dependence on fossil fuel exports depends on this.”
But the relationship is complicated.
China is building a second icebreaker able to cruise polar waters. Russia is not crazy about the competition, according to a Pentagon analysis published this year as part of its annual report to Congress.