China, Russia have chilling plans for Arctic

The Economist carries an article about the two autocracies dreaming of creating a “polar silk road”, Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Four hundred kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, in the Norwegian port of Kirkenes, there are still some who dream that this sleepy town will one day become an important shipping hub. They see it as the western end of a new, faster sea route from China to Europe, made possible by the impact of global warming on ice-filled waters off the Siberian coast. With war raging in Ukraine, this ambition now sounds fanciful. China’s support for Russia is fuelling Western distrust of the Asian power’s “polar silk road” plans. But China is not retreating from the Arctic. It still sees a chance to boost its influence there, and to benefit from the area’s wealth of natural resources.

Rising temperatures in the Arctic are slowly opening up new possibilities for transport. But geopolitics are changing the region faster. Kirkenes feels this strongly. It is just 15 minutes’ drive from the Russian border. Tourists can enjoy a “king crab safari” that takes them by boat right up to it, with eponymous crustaceans caught along the way and cooked for the visitors (the massive non-native species was introduced by the Soviets). Russians, though, no longer cross into Kirkenes for shopping and crab feasts. On May 29th Norway closed the border crossing to day-trippers from the other side. The conflict in Ukraine has cast a chill over the town. There were “tensions in the air” in October when Russia’s envoy in Kirkenes laid a wreath at a monument to the Soviet troops who liberated the town from the Nazis towards the end of the second world war, the Barents Observer, a local online newspaper, reported. Politicians in Kirkenes had urged him not to do so.

In such a climate it is hard to imagine how China’s Arctic silk-road project, unveiled in 2017, might take off. It had sounded a great idea. By using the Arctic’s Northern Sea Route (see map), shipments from Shanghai to Hamburg could take a mere 18 days compared with about 35 days needed for the route via the Suez Canal—or ten days longer than that if rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid attacks by the Houthi rebels in Yemen (there have been dozens against ships in the Red Sea since the war in Gaza began last year).

Kirkenes had hoped to sell itself as the first ice-free port that container ships from China would reach after traversing the Russian segment. They could use it as a place to offload cargo onto vessels that would sail on to other ports in Europe. Or they could transfer their goods onto trains that would take them much faster into European markets. Chinese businesspeople were keen, says Rune Rafaelsen, who was the mayor of Kirkenes from 2015 to 2021. Were all this to happen, northern Europe would change from a mere “end point” of the flow of goods from China into a “gateway” for them, enthused Qiushi, the Chinese Communist Party’s main theoretical journal, in 2019. The “silk road on ice” (as China calls its polar transportation plan in Chinese) would become a “new platform” for the Belt and Road Initiative, it said, referring to the country’s spree of port, railway, road and other infrastructure-building around the world.

A big problem is that Kirkenes has no rail connection with anywhere in Europe. There had been talk of building one with neighbouring Finland (its border is only 50km away; the line would join the Finnish rail network in the city of Rovaniemi, “the official home of Santa Claus”, 500km to the south). Even before the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine the Finnish government had got cold feet about this. In 2019 it published a report expressing doubt that such a line could be profitable, let alone acceptable to indigenous reindeer-herders, the Sami, whose land it would traverse. Now, says the Barents Observer’s editor, Thomas Nilsen, the Finnish authorities “don’t want to subsidise and build a railway line so close to the Russian border”, given the area’s “geopolitical instability”.

Chilly relations

Western governments have long been cautious about China’s Arctic activities, worrying that the country’s growing economic influence in the region might give it political sway and open doors to a Chinese security presence that would add to the Arctic challenge that Russia already poses. rand, a think-tank in Washington, notes that since 2018 China’s “diplomatic activism” in Greenland, an Arctic dependency of Denmark, has waned, probably as a result of successful efforts by Denmark and America to block Chinese attempts to invest in sensitive infrastructure and mining there (Greenland hosts an American airbase with missile-warning and space-surveillance systems).

The war in Ukraine has compounded Western scepticism about any big project involving China, which calls itself neutral but also boasts a “no-limits” friendship with Russia and is giving huge support to Russia’s defence industry. The conflict has led to the freezing of activities of the Arctic Council, a talking-shop involving the eight countries with Arctic territory, which China joined as an observer in 2013. (In a white paper in 2018 China called itself a “near-Arctic state”, though its northernmost provincial capital, Harbin, is on the same latitude as Venice.) All of the council’s members, except Russia, are now members of nato, Finland and Sweden having joined the defence pact in the past 15 months. In Arctic affairs, China finds itself even more of an outsider.

The frustration this has caused in China is clear. In Russian Studies, another Chinese journal, two Chinese academics, Yue Peng and Gu Zhengsheng, wrote in February that Russia was growing weaker in the high north. “The original balance of the Arctic has been disrupted, and the scales in the Arctic region are tipping towards the Western countries.” China’s image in the region, they said, faced “a significant risk of decline”. This could have a “huge negative impact on China’s future participation in Arctic affairs”, the academics suggested.

Russia controls about half of the Arctic’s shoreline and a huge share of its oil and gas reserves. For now, Chinese ships may not be pushing to use the Northern Sea Route (Russia charges stiff fees for the use of its icebreakers). Shippers prefer predictable schedules: for all the Arctic’s warming, journey times along that passage can vary as a result of ice and fog. Chinese firms, however, see gains to be made in Russia as it turns to Asia to make up for the loss of Western markets. They include involvement in port construction, oil and gas projects and the building of ships for Russia to sail such resources eastward (China is a big buyer of Russian energy). Russia may once have been wary of getting China involved in developing its Arctic coast. Now it welcomes Chinese help. “Russia is very keen to have them, because they have no other options,” says Kjell Stokvik of the Centre for High North Logistics in Kirkenes. “So in a way for China, they’re in a very good seat.”

There are risks, as Messrs Yue and Gu noted, such as fallout from Western sanctions. They urged China to be “cautious and low-profile” in its approach to Arctic co-operation with Russia. However, during a visit by Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, to Beijing in May the two countries vowed to “promote the Arctic route as an important international transport corridor” and encourage their companies to “strengthen co-operation in increasing Arctic route traffic volume and building Arctic route logistics infrastructure”. The silk road on ice is slippery, but it retains its allure.