Could Beijing’s Arctic ambitions lead to confrontation with Moscow?
At a recent summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his readiness to create a joint Russian-Chinese working group to develop the Northern Sea Route (NSR). However, the offer did not lead to a new Chinese contract to buy more Russian gas, as the Kremlin leader evidently expected. Rather, it has raised concern in the Russian Federation that China is now able to sideline Russia not only along the NSR, but more broadly in the Arctic. Indeed, a Russian observer on the Telegram channel “Captain Arctic” warns that Putin's wrong move gave Xi “the keys” to the Arctic and pushed Russia into a minefield, where an area Moscow has always considered exclusively his own will now be subject to negotiations with a foreign power with extremely important interests of its own. According to this observer, while the conflict with the West over Ukraine will end, Russia's differences with China will continue and Moscow will come to regret the advantages it has granted to Beijing ( T.me/caparctic, March 21). A reasoning that makes no sense: the West has never contested the Arctic area traditionally under Russian jurisdiction, and in any case the war will end, bringing Europe back to its role as an energy customer. China, on the other hand, is being invited into Russia's backyard.
For much of the last decade, China has worked hard to take a leading role in the Arctic, both economically and geostrategically . He built icebreakers and ships capable of dealing with the ice and promoted the development of Chinese infrastructure in those northern areas of Russia where Moscow, increasingly struggling, could not afford to do so . But Putin's willingness to involve China in the joint development of the NSR, especially since he received nothing in return, represents a major turning point, highlighting Russia's growing weakness in the Arctic and China's growing strength.
Putin clearly believes that by giving Beijing this opening, Russia will receive the short-term help it needs and could even convince China to agree to buy more Russian natural gas, which is crucial for Gazprom given the loss of markets in West. Some Russian experts agree. Others, however, argue that the Russian president is overconfident. They argue that the Chinese, being tough bargainers, believe that Moscow, faced with the problems of declining gas sales to the West, will eventually be forced to sell its gas to China at an even greater discount – and Beijing knows it. Moreover, they point out that the fact that Putin mixed this problem with the development of the NSR represents a much more serious and, from Russia's point of view, negative development. According to Chinese officials, Beijing is not only interested in the NSR. It just wants to have a say in the Arctic more broadly and also in the development of the portions of Russia bordering China, areas that Moscow has long deemed its rightful property .
Vasily Koltashov, an expert at Moscow's Plekhanov University of Economics, is one such skeptic. According to him, everything will be fine if Russia manages to control China's participation in Arctic affairs. In that case, Beijing would make the investments Russia needs without challenging Moscow's position. However, there is a very real risk that if Moscow's position deteriorates further or if the Kremlin fails to handle the situation well, China will exploit the circumstances and Russia will be "turned into China's periphery", a result which Putin clearly does not want but may not be able to prevent . In that case, Russia will not only lose its dominance over the NSR: it will also lose its place in the Arctic. Other Russian analysts, including Igor Yushkov of Moscow Financial University, argue that the summit shows that China is thinking in much broader terms than Russia, focusing on the Arctic as a whole rather than just the Arctic region.
Russia's turn to Asia and especially China in the Arctic may be more ramified than even the Putin-Xi exchange discussions suggest. In recent decades, Russia has focused its efforts on the Arctic Council, of which it has assumed the chairmanship for the past two years. But because other members boycotted the organization in protest of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Arctic Council has not played the role that neither Russia nor its Western members expected. Western Arctic powers have continued bilateral and multilateral consultations with each other on Arctic issues, but Russia has adopted a different strategy. In recent months he has tried to create an alternative to the Arctic Council, involving China and other Asian countries to make it less of a target of Western boycotts.
Moscow has taken the initiative to establish the Russian-Asian Consortium of Arctic Researchers, known by the Russian acronym RAKAI, which brings together scholars primarily from Russia and China, but also from North and South Korea, India, Vietnam , Singapore and Hong Kong.
Not surprisingly, this group played a key role in a meeting of arctic researchers in Yakutsk that took place the same week as the Putin-Xi meeting. This is yet another indication of Russia's eastward turn in the Arctic and Beijing's exploitation of Moscow's move, especially when it comes to programs and policies affecting the region .
At the moment, it might be too much to suggest that Putin has handed Xi “the keys to the Arctic,” as the Telegram channel “Captain Arctic” suggests. However, the fact that some Russians think it has done so calls attention to just how big of a change is taking place in the Arctic. Furthermore, these judgments about what Putin has done will have consequences even if these fears prove exaggerated, sparking opposition in the form of resistance or, worse, rejection of the Kremlin leader's move. And that could lead some of those who fear China's ascendancy over Russia to go public with long-standing Russian fears that Beijing is planning to absorb parts of the Russian Federation. If either of those two things happen, they could highlight Putin's offer to Xi of a joint NSR development working group among the most important developments to emerge from their meeting.
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The article Could Beijing's Arctic ambitions lead to confrontation with Moscow? comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/le-ambizioni-artiche-di-pechino-possono-portare-allo-scontro-con-mosca/ on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 15:18:40 +0000.