China’s polar ice breaker, the Xue Long. Photo Credit: Xinhua/Qu Jing)
For a country lacking an Arctic coast, China has shown uncommon interest in joining the Arctic Council, an organization of actual littoral Arctic nations and which seeks to balance the region’s development with environmental protection. The Council has now granted China observer status, along with India, Italy, Japan, Singapore and South Korea.
China’s motives are commercial and opportunistic. Global warming makes feasible ice-free trade routes across the roof of the world, at least in summer months. Chinese exporters would find it faster and safer, and thus cheaper, to ship their goods to Europe through Arctic sea lanes than to send them, as they do now, via the Strait of Malacca to the Indian Ocean and the waters off the Horn of Africa, running a gauntlet of piracy along the way.
The same would be true for vessels bringing natural resources from northern Europe — Chinese mining companies are starting to invest in Greenland — and the eastern seaboard of the Americas. The Arctic could also yield its own natural resources. The remote, icy waters may hold up to a quarter of the world’s undiscovered fossil fuel reserves. Global warming makes them, too, potentially feasible to extract for part of the year (although polar drilling for oil and gas is technically challenging and expensive).
Last year, the Xue Long (Snow Dragon), the world’s largest non-nuclear-powered ice breaker, weaved its way from China to Iceland through five of the seas that comprise the Arctic Ocean, believed to be the first such voyage by a Chinese vessel. China signed a free-trade agreement with Iceland last month, its first with a European country. The two nations have also been cooperating on geothermal projects in China and Africa.
Beijing has a second polar icebreaker on the order books, due for delivery next year, and is beefing up its scientific research under the aegis of the Polar Research Institute of China. China does have a legitimate scientific interest in the region: sea-ice melt could be altering the jet stream and thus causing colder and snowier winters in China (in Europe and North America, too), and the Xue Long’s trip was billed as one of atmospheric and oceanographic research. But China’s purposes here well exceeds the scientific. The Arctic is the latest region where the Communist nation is seeking to expand its geopolitical footprint, led by its mariners, petroleum engineers, fishermen and scientific researchers. Observer status at the Council lets it listen in on meetings and propose and finance policies. And purse-string power is something China understands well how to deploy.
Of the Council’s full members — the U.S., Canada, the Nordic countries, and Russia — it is the last, Russia, with which China will most likely find itself in the greatest strategic conflict. With its long Arctic coastline, Russia sees itself as the Arctic’s big dog and main energy producer. One of the issues on which the Council will have to weigh in on is Moscow’s attempt to extend Russian sovereignty over its Arctic continental shelf beyond the present 200-mile limit all the way to the North Pole. Beijing will not want to see Moscow’s sway extended that far, and with it the rights to grant exploration and development licenses for the rich deposits of oil and gas that would lie within.
Maritime territorial disputes are familiar territory to Beijing, as is resistance to its expanding global presence — witness its recent experiences in Africa. Environmental protestors will add an extra dimension to that in the Arctic. Greenpeace has already gone after Russian energy companies Gazprom and Rosneft for starting to extract oil from Arctic waters. Beijing will move cautiously into the Arctic. But, with icy cold determination, move it will.
