Snow Dragon: China’s Arctic Policy Facing New Challenges

The sharp deterioration between Russia and the West that began in February 2022 has posed a serious challenge to the advancement of Arctic cooperation, which has become increasingly intense, fruitful, and, to a large extent, mutually beneficial for its participants over the past several decades. China, which has demonstrated to the world that it has ambitions in the region, is facing difficult challenges. In this regard, some research questions about Beijing’s Arctic strategy need to be addressed. Will the strengthening of cooperation with Russia harm the building of interaction with the other Arctic states? To what extent will the security crisis and the gradual transformation of the established system of international cooperation in the Arctic affect China’s plans to integrate the region into its global strategic projects? What role can China play in the future Arctic governance system? The objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the changes currently taking place in China’s Arctic policy. The methodological foundation of the study is the theory of regional security complexes by B. Buzan and O. Wæver. It has been determined that the policy of building an Arctic identity, one of the key components of which is the securitization of the climate discourse, is meeting increasing resistance from Western countries. In the context of the current crisis, Beijing is also forced to balance its bilateral relations with Russia and the states of Northern Europe. The erosion of the existing international Arctic cooperation framework is highly undesirable for China, as it allowed Beijing to legitimately take a limited role in the governance of the region, as opposed to the regulatory regimes of total domination of the Arctic states (sectoral approach). However, at the doctrinal level, there has been a shift in the focus in China’s Arctic policy toward a more global vision of the region’s development. The foreign policy shift has been driven by a number of external factors, including the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic and the intensifying Sino-American strategic confrontation.