Inside China’s great game for the Arctic

Once a frozen frontier and geostrategic backwater, the Arctic is now an important geopolitical theatre. America’s new national security strategy stresses hemispheric national interests. Russia regards itself as a sort of Arctic gatekeeper, and, despite the burdens of the ongoing war in Ukraine, its investment in its own Northern Fleet and naval and maritime infrastructure has persisted. Europe has been pulled into Arctic geopolitics by Donald Trump’s insistence on wanting to ‘own’ Greenland. China’s growing Arctic interests are also attracting attention, and sit firmly in the crosshairs of the United States and NATO.

China is, though, relatively speaking, an Arctic newcomer, compared to the United States, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Russia, whose long-standing strategic and military interests date back at least to the Second World War. China is about as close to the Arctic Circle as Rome, and slightly further away than Berlin, but it nonetheless deems itself to be a ‘near-Arctic state’.

Once interested mainly in collaborative scientific research and, more recently, in climate change and oceanic science, China has now become a sharper and more assertive player. It is still interested in Arctic science and commerce, but also increasingly in ice-breaking, seabed research and mining, acoustical research that benefits submarines, undersea cables and communications, and sea-going craft, aircraft and drones capable of undertaking intelligence functions.

China’s growing interest in the Arctic is not unique. According to the US Geological Survey, the Arctic is home to 30 per cent of the world’s undiscovered natural gas, and 13 per cent of its undiscovered oil. These resources reside within areas owned by Canada, the US, Russia, Norway and Denmark via Greenland. It is believed to have significant resources of nickel, copper, gemstones, graphite, several other minerals and metals and rare earth elements. China’s own reserves of rare earths are significant, but it also has a near-monopolistic chokehold over their processing, and so its interests, especially in Greenland, are self-evident. It is thought that Greenland’s 1.5 million tons of rare earth reserves make it about the eighth biggest, and include two rare earth deposits that are among the largest in the world.

Given the weaponisation of rare earths in China’s trade with the United States and the EU, and the volatile truce that prevails for the moment, the quest to diversify away from China in this space will only gather momentum.

The impact of global warming on the ice caps and flows is likely over time not only to facilitate minerals and metals projects, but also cheaper and faster shipping routes. These are expected to be open for more than a handful of months in the year – not unimportant for the world’s largest export nation, and one with a strong interest in strategic maritime and oceanic advantage. In the geopolitics of our time, China certainly has cause, as its strategic rivals do, to emphasise even more the importance of supply chains, trade routes, critical resources and data and communications assets, including in the Arctic.

As things stand, Chinese ships sailing westwards currently have to pass through various chokepoints between the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea and the Mediterranean, including the Malacca Straits, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, and the Suez Canal. These could all be used to interfere with or block passage in the event of rising tension or war, to which current events in the Middle East bear witness.

Distance and cost also matter. The journey from the Chinese industrial port of Dalian to Rotterdam via the Suez route is 20,500 km and takes about 48 days. Around the Cape of Good Hope, instead, it’s over 27,000 km and about 57 days. But the distance using the Northern Sea Route that hugs Russia’s Arctic coast is about a third less than the Suez route and takes only 20-28 days. The Northwest passage, linking the north Pacific to the north Atlantic, and skirting the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic coastlines, is another route to the north Atlantic, the eastern United States, and Europe, even the Panama Canal. China could exploit this route, too, as it becomes more navigable, faster and cheaper.

It is also worth noting that China is the world’s second biggest consumer of oil and the third biggest of natural gas. Oil imports account for almost three quarters of total oil supplies, half of which come from the Gulf and have to be shipped through the Strait of Hormuz and then the Malacca Straits. China would benefit if Russia’s Arctic oil could substitute for current imports sourced to the Gulf, if it could access more Russian gas.

China’s interest in the Arctic dates back to the 1960s, when it became involved in polar expeditions. Despite not having an Arctic coastline, China has long proclaimed an interest in Arctic routes, ports and sea corridors, as well as strategically and militarily significant resources, along with scientific research and co-operation. By the 1990s and 2000s, China’s engagement was deepening with the establishment of dedicated scientific institutions. In 2013, China became an observer to the governance-focused Arctic Council. Xi Jinping would later explain that the goal of becoming a polar power was an important part of the wider objective of becoming a great maritime power. In 2015, China emphasised the importance of the polar regions to its national security in its National Security Law.

In 2017, soon after the National Development and Reform Commission evoked the concept of an Arctic Blue Economic Passage, Xi Jinping launched the term Polar Silk Road in Moscow as a more formal strategy that dovetailed with his signature foreign policy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The term was incorporated as official policy in 2018, when the State Council Information Office published China’s Arctic policy stating that ‘China hopes to work with all parties to build a “Polar Silk Road” through developing the Arctic shipping routes.’

There are some inevitable similarities with the BRI. China’s Arctic projects, and loan programmes don’t have to be commercially viable or profitable, so long as they help to add political and strategic value which might in time underscore China’s regional significance and capacity for political   influence. It collaborates with Russia, but also, at least until the Ukraine war, had engaged liberally with the other Arctic states individually and on a multilateral basis. In the Polar Silk Road, like the BRI’s ‘community of human destiny’ and other foreign policy initiatives, China argues that new and different governance practices are called for.

Instead of the Arctic being a region divided up between Arctic powers, China sees it as a global commons where all countries have interests and a role to play. It maintains that the governance of the Arctic requires the participation and contribution of all stakeholders, and, as if to underscore the point, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Mao Ning, stated earlier this year in January that ‘the Arctic concerns the overall interests of the international community’. In pursuing this agenda, it is clear that China’s apparent altruism is really more about framing a governance system that it thinks will be much more favourable to its own Arctic access and status. China’s Arctic interests are designed to boost China, not support the Nordic nations.

Nonetheless, in the last few years, the Polar Silk Road has certainly been a poor cousin by comparison with the BRI. Attempts to internationalise the Arctic have fallen rather flat with other western members of the Arctic Council, which have been suspicious of China’s military intentions, and opposed to its support for Russia. Other major Global South countries, such as Brazil, UAE, Singapore and India, are engaged in, or observers of, some economic and scientific initiatives, but not really involved at a deeper level.

Although Chinese firms have sought to exploit natural resources, invest in infrastructure, and purchase land, their success has been limited in scope and scale. Tough operating conditions, Arctic weather, deficient infrastructure, high costs, and also pushback from other Arctic states have contributed to low-level accomplishments. It has been reported that Sweden, Finland and Denmark have all acted to withdraw from or scale back land purchases, air and naval bases and scientific projects involving China. European Arctic states, as well as the United States, have been put off by the nature of China’s military-civil fusion projects, in which ostensibly civilian projects and programmes have simultaneous military uses and benefits.

For example, in a letter to the then Secretaries of State and Defence in 2024, the members of the Congressional Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party asked for stronger measures to address dual-use research in the Arctic by China. Among other things, they emphasised the research being carried out at the Chinese research station on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago (between Greenland and Russia) by a Chinese space physics firm whose parent was a leading defence conglomerate in China. The formal research activities dovetailed neatly with defence-sensitive, state-of-the-art radar, the effects of space weather on military communications and navigations systems, and missile guidance systems.

If China’s engagement with western Arctic Council members has become more strained in recent years, one might imagine that it would be flourishing with Russia. Yet, bilateral relations are a bit of a curate’s egg now: they can be as tight as they are tense. Putin has certainly enjoyed China’s support in bolstering Russia’s control over the Northern Sea Route, and its ability to sustain natural gas exports and trade. It has also provided economic, technological and ports, logistics and training support, and worked with Russia on under-ice acoustics, and undersea and satellite communications, as well as organised joint military patrols and exercises.

Yet, in the Arctic, they have not made much headway with or developed their joint governance capacity, their engagement with BRICS countries, finance and investment flows, or even the value of their military operations. Moreover, the international sanctions regime and the Ukraine war are draining Russia’s capacity to construct new ice-breakers and small modular reactors needed to provide energy for remote settlements and resource extraction. The underlying story here is about rising Russian reliance on China, but also Russian angst about the façade of its own Arctic sovereignty and ambitions under China’s growing dominance of their relationship more generally.

There is no question that the Arctic has become an important focal point of and for strategic rivalry. By proclaiming itself as a ‘near-Arctic’ state with material, commercial and military interests in the region, and insisting on its ‘internationalisation’, China has in effect thrown down a gauntlet to the littoral powers, notably the United States, Canada and Scandinavian states, but also to Russia.

Militarily, the Arctic commands attention for its newly opening sea routes and commercial opportunities, the deployment of nuclear powered and armed submarines, and its geographic status in the missile routes between the United States and Eurasia. For the United States, it is integral to national security. For Finland and Sweden, as recently signatories to NATO, the region has an additional importance.

Politically, the Arctic lacks the urgency and passion that China reserves for Taiwan and the South China Sea, but it is clear that its goal in the Arctic, as elsewhere, is to create commercial footprints and infrastructure, and influence the region’s politics to gain military intelligence and advantage. An independent Greenland, for example, might be amenable to greater Chinese trade and investment, and economic involvement, which China could exploit in the same way as it does its presence in, say, Cambodia or Mauritius.

Economically, China’s interests and capacity in trade, shipping and ports, energy, science and infrastructure have in the past been calling cards for greater involvement and collaboration. But, for now at least, western Arctic Council members have pushed back against China in the wake of higher levels of distrust, and concerns about dual civilian-military use.

The geopolitics, though, have been shaken up this year by President Trump’s aggressive posture and language in relation to Greenland. He rightly framed the strategic necessity to keep China at arm’s length in what the United States sees as its back yard, and emphasised the significance of American interests in military access and control in the context of the new hemispheric security doctrine. Yet, the manner of his early statements and interventions was, to say the least, politically unfortunate. He appointed a special envoy to Greenland, insisted on ownership of the territory, threatened Denmark with tariffs, and wouldn’t rule out military action at one stage.

The heat generated by these interventions has dissipated a bit, despite Trump’s renewal of his calls for Greenland to be ‘controlled’ by the United States at the recent NATO summit in Ankara. Nonetheless, the US President’s approach has alienated Denmark, and also other European allies, including those in the Arctic Council, and Canada. The diplomatic fissure resulted in a flurry of western political leaders going to Beijing to re-set relations with Xi Jinping, including the prime ministers of Finland and Canada. Mark Carney, in particular, said he wanted to establish a ‘new strategic partnership’ with China that might lead to progress in areas of mutual interest. Soon after, he went to Davos to make a memorable speech about how middle powers needed to stand up to the United States.

For the Nordic region, though, the new uncomfortable relationship with Trump’s America is especially awkward, bearing in mind that China has long been viewed with mistrust. It isn’t exactly the kind of strategic partner that Mark Carney’s Davos ‘hedge’ suggested, and that China would like to be. Earlier this month, Foreign Minister Wang Yi paid a visit to all the Nordic countries except Iceland, almost the first time such a visit had happened in a quarter of a century.

Diplomatically, the optics were mostly fine, but Nordic resentment about China’s backing for Russia, its totalitarian politics and the simmering trade war with Europe runs deep. Nordic states are big on ‘green’, innovation, intermediate and upstream production, machinery and pharmaceuticals, which are exactly the areas that China’s trade has shifted to replicate in recent years in the wake of its unprecedented industrial policy. They aren’t going to be as vulnerable as Germany, say, but might also suffer if their trade with Germany does. And away from the glare of publicity, Norway, for example, has recently reminded the Chinese government that they are tenants on Svalbard, nothing more, by removing the two large Chinese lion statues that had stood in front entrance to its research base on the Norwegian archipelago for over 20 years, along with a sign reading ‘Yellow River Station’.

This at least suggests that the fractious relationship with America may ultimately be more manageable than the mistrust over China’s governance and strategic goals on their Arctic turf. If, on the other hand, disunity and discord among NATO countries persisted or worsened, China would doubtless look for opportunities to exploit rifts, and persist in trying to present itself as the reliable partner for, say, Canada and Nordic nations.

Nevertheless, with the background of China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the low level of trust regarding China over scientific, commercial and governance matters, it seems unlikely that even a higher level of engagement and collaboration with China over things such as trade or scientific research will negate or diminish the enduring rivalry over strategic and national interests.