It is northern China’s version of the shipping forecast and, like Britain’s nightly bulletin, it marks out the range of its seafarers’ geographical ambitions.
So when the Tianjin Coastal Radio Station added the Bering, Dmitry Laptev, Velikitsky and Kara Straits to its list of seaways last week, the decision gave some indication of Chinese interest in a once-unlikely destination: the Northeast Passage.
The four straits are the key points along the celebrated and once impenetrable route along Russia’s northern Arctic coastline between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
In the past decade Chinese vessels have begun using the route, once best known for its pack ice. Global warming is lengthening the summer season when the ice breaks up and it becomes navigable —and Russia is also keen to promote it as a zone where the new Russia-China political axis can escape the gaze of America.
Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear corporation which oversees the passage and its fleet of nuclear-powered ice-breakers, wants trade to increase along Russia’s northern coast tenfold in the next decade. That depends on the route becoming attractive to Chinese cargo vessels and tankers, as the world’s single biggest trading nation. And China is keen to comply.
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“China views this as part of the joint creation of the ‘Ice Silk Road’, establishing a blue [water] economic corridor connecting the two major markets of China and Europe,” Zhao Long, an expert on China’s policies on the Arctic region at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, told The Times.
As the world opened up to trade in the 16th century, discovering the Northeast Passage and its northwestern counterpart over the top of the American landmass became a romantic quest for adventurers. Their efforts were often funded by merchants interested in Chinese and other Asian products.
What they found was that the length of the route was only navigable for a few short weeks, at most.
The Soviet Union, however, made northern trade a prestige goal. To this day, Russia is the only country to deploy nuclear-powered icebreakers; hence control of the north sea route being handed to Rosatom.
They can in theory break a way through the ice at any time of year, and accompany cargo ships. But in practice, the route is still only open to practical navigation for container vessels during peak summer.
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The route is still blocked by ice in the winter months and that is unlikely to change in the next few decades, even with global warming. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that Arctic global warming will be twice as fast on average as the planet as a whole, leading to “a state of substantial ice-free conditions in summer by the year 2050”, according to experts cited by a study in Nature magazine in February.
Both sides want to exploit that change and China, which is interested in both polar regions for commercial, resource extraction and strategic reasons, is now believed to have its own programmes for building nuclear icebreakers. One is in Shanghai, another in Harbin, in China’s far north, and a noted centre of military as well as civilian scientific research.
The Arctic route is, of course, particularly important for trade between China and northern Russia. But even for trade between China and Europe it is theoretically shorter, cutting the distance from Shanghai to Rotterdam by a quarter compared with the route south through the Red Sea and Suez Canal.
Just as significantly, it removes a host of potential risks. Suez Canal traffic has been halved in the past few months because of attacks on shipping in the Red Sea by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, although the militants have promised not to target vessels coming from China, a strategic ally of their backer, Iran.
The north sea route also provides an alternative to seaways where the United States’s huge navy has a big presence, such as the Malacca Strait off southeast Asia.
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That is why Russia sees China as a natural partner to develop the route. For all Moscow’s ambitions, just 80 vessels passed along the route last year, compared with 26,000 through the Suez Canal.
In 2022, the last full year before the outbreak of the Gaza war which triggered the Houthis’ attacks on western shipping, 1.27 billion tonnes of cargo passed through Suez. Rosatom says the figure for the north sea passage was 36 million tonnes. Half of that was Russian liquefied natural gas.
It wants to increase that to 127 million tonnes by 2035; a highly ambitious target and one that is dependent on China. When President Putin met President Xi in Beijing last October he was accompanied by his deputy prime minister Alexander Novak, who was tasked with promoting the north sea route to Beijing.
A Chinese container vessel was the first commercial cargo ship to traverse the north sea passage from one end to the other, in 2013. Moscow sees no reason why that should not be the start of a trend.
As with all matters pertaining to Russia, however, China is positive on outward appearances but ambiguous at a deeper level. Since the Ukraine war, Russia has become heavily dependent on diplomatic backing from China, which proclaims neutrality but has accused the West and Nato of “provoking” Putin.
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China has also defied the West by buying Russian gas and oil, and selling machine parts and electronics to its arms industry.
But it is also aware that Russia has in recent decades been a rival as much as a friend. The nuclear icebreaker industry, a very niche one, is a case in point. Five years ago, Russia invited China to participate in the development of a new generation of icebreakers — fully aware that the technology is the same that drives nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Two years later, the invitation was abruptly withdrawn.
While Russia wants geopolitical Chinese support, and in particular its financial investment, it also wants to be the controlling partner, certainly in areas that it considers its backyard, like the Arctic. China’s strategy for the Arctic is to make it “international”, in which as a leading world power it can take an automatic place at the “top table” of policymakers when it comes to distribution of resources.
“Sino-Russian Arctic ties will continue to be predictable to a large extent,” Elizabeth Buchanan, a former Australian defence official, wrote in a paper on China’s Arctic strategy for the Royal United Services Institute. “Ties will remain mutually beneficial — until they are not.”
Zhao Long, the Chinese researcher, said that while Beijing is publicly bullish about countering western sanctions policy, it does not want to be trapped into a perceived “anti-western” posture in its long-term trade relations. Too deep a partnership on the north sea passage would further that image, he said.
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“The Chinese government firmly opposes any form of unilateral sanctions, but Chinese enterprises remain very cautious when participating in co-operation with Russia on Arctic energy and shipping, to avoid violating relevant sanctions,” he said.
Besides, there is still the question of all that ice, rarely a problem in the Suez Canal. “The ice-free period in summer is short, and the complex ice conditions in other seasons result in significant uncertainty in arrival times,” Zhao said.
