U.S. national-security officials say the Chinese undersea expeditions offer fresh evidence of a growing threat from China in the Arctic region, known as the High North. This year, Chinese military and research vessels have operated around Alaska’s Arctic waters in unprecedented numbers, the Dept. of Homeland Security reported in November.
For China, mastery of Arctic travel could yield valuable data about the natural resources awaiting below melting ice caps, significantly reduce travel time for commercial shipping and position nuclear-armed submarines closer to potential targets, including the U.S., say Western marine strategists and military officials.
“The Chinese are being more and more aggressive” across the High North, said U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the top military leader of North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Chinese vessels on research missions often give cover to military purposes, he said.
China has declared itself a “near-Arctic power,” an informal designation Beijing hopes will place it alongside the U.S. and Russia. China’s Foreign Ministry says its activities in the Arctic are reasonable and lawful, “contributing to the maintenance and promotion of peace, stability, and sustainable development in the region.”
Beijing views future sea routes through the High North as a shortcut for global commerce, a so-called Polar Silk Road. China this summer sent a cargo ship to the Polish port of Gdansk by skirting the North Pole, a route twice as fast as travel times using the Suez Canal. Chinese officials have said they plan to expand trans-Arctic cargo traffic with Russia, particularly imports of liquefied natural gas.
During the Cold War, the Arctic marked a front line dividing NATO members and Moscow. Its waters offered Russia gateways to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which the U.S. and its allies closely patrolled until the early 1990s—and are now policing again.
Arctic waters provide a military advantage because of the North Pole’s proximity to other nations. The U.S. in 1959 sent the world’s third nuclear submarine there to pop up from under ice, delivering a potent warning to the Kremlin. Moscow reciprocated in 1962. Today, the two rivals are again dispatching submarines on Arctic exercises.
Tensions over the High North, renewed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, are being amplified by China’s reach. The U.S. and its allies expect Beijing will be able to send armed submarines to the North Pole within a few years. China already has military-grade surface vessels in the Arctic region while expanding its fleet of ice-breaking ships.
The U.S. and allies are training more Arctic troops in response to new dangers. They have beefed up sub-hunting patrols out of Iceland and other locations. President Trump struck a shipbuilding deal with Finland to expand the U.S. icebreaker fleet and has pressured Denmark into expanding defenses on and around Greenland.
Grynkewich in December put NATO members Denmark, Sweden and Finland under the alliance’s Atlantic and Arctic command to bolster the defense of the High North, citing “the alignment of our adversaries.”
Chinese and Russian military planes last year flew patrols near Alaska for the first time, with Chinese long-range bombers operating from a Russian air base.
Such cooperation not only gives China new abilities to strike North America but raises the prospect of a joint attack by America’s most powerful adversaries, Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, told Congress in April.
‘Basically warships’
China in 2015 updated its national-security law to include defending national interests in polar regions, seeking unfettered access to new sea lanes and resources, said Ryan Martinson, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute. There is much evidence, he said, that China’s goal is to conduct naval operations in the Arctic Ocean.
Beijing says its commercial and research vessels in Arctic waters are peaceful. That was accurate until recently, according to Rob Bauer, a retired Dutch admiral who served as one of NATO’s top military officials until this year. Beijing, in addition to staging joint air patrols with Russia, is now sailing coast guard vessels that resemble frigates near the Alaska coast, he said.
“They’re basically warships, but they’re painted white,” Bauer said. Joint patrols with Russian navy ships indicate China’s aim is gaining military advantage, he said, not coastal security. When more ice melts along international waterways in the High North, the same shortcuts used by commercial vessels could speed China’s navy into the Atlantic, he said.
Arctic travel by Beijing’s commercial and scientific vessels benefits China’s navy by gaining experience and data about a region relatively new to its military leaders. China’s policies merge its civilian and military spheres, aiming to strengthen its armed forces through collaboration with universities, research institutions and defense companies.
Beijing’s polar exploration echoes its military expansion in the South China Sea. China launched research expeditions and published academic papers about the region almost 20 years ago. In 2013, Beijing used what it learned to begin building artificial islands that now hold military air bases, according to intelligence officials from the U.S. and Pacific allies.
In the Arctic, the U.S. and NATO worry most about subsea warfare. Submarine navigation relies on detailed knowledge of ocean-floor topography and undersea conditions. China is cataloging the world’s oceans to build computer models to guide submarines and help them evade detection, military experts say.
“China doesn’t field the world’s largest fleet of oceanographic survey ships because they want to save the whales,” said Hunter Stires, a naval strategist who until this year advised the Secretary of the Navy. “China aims to take the lead in marine and climate science because understanding the ocean and the climate is a critical enabler to success in naval operations, particularly in anti-submarine warfare.”
U.S. analysts say data China gathered from its Arctic dives north of Alaska and Greenland isn’t just about studying climate change, as Beijing’s state news agency reports, but also to educate the Chinese navy, which operates relatively noisy submarines that are easily tracked by U.S. forces.
Arctic ice impedes airborne submarine detection that works in other oceans. Water temperature layers and changing salinity from melting ice interfere with sonar. Icebergs colliding and the chatter of marine mammals generate sounds that complicate submarine detection. Information gathered on Chinese Arctic voyages enables its scientists to build computer models of undersea conditions, which its navy can later tap to plot routes allowing them to operate more freely in the open sea.
China’s ultimate aim, said Adm. Samuel Paparo, head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, is to end “American undersea dominance,” he told a conference in Canada in 2024.
To help Beijing reach that goal, Paparo said, “I expect Russia to provide submarine technology.”
Partners of convenience
Beijing sells Russia electronics and components for military equipment Moscow needs to wage its war in Ukraine, and ships civilian products restricted by international sanctions over the war.
Western military officials believe Russia is repaying China’s help, in part, by sharing advanced technologies in space, stealth aircraft and undersea warfare. Russia’s nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarines, and its agility in deploying them, have kept the country a superpower, despite its economic decline since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
China is already mastering other complex naval domains. It now deploys three aircraft carriers, among the most demanding surface warships to build, manage and deploy effectively. Only the U.S. has more.
Both Beijing and the U.S. are short of vessels capable of navigating thick Arctic ice compared with Russia, which has more than 40. China last year commissioned its fifth icebreaker. The U.S. has only two such vessels in operation, and Trump is buying more.
After years of development, China launched its first domestically built icebreaker in 2019 with Finnish help. Last year, it built and deployed its first domestically designed icebreaker in 10 months, a swift accomplishment noted with worry in Arctic countries.
Russia also has advocated for greater Chinese involvement in governance of the High North and invited China to develop infrastructure in Arctic Russia. The two nations created a working group in 2023 to develop northern sea routes. They agreed to coordinate Arctic maritime law-enforcement, initiated by their recent joint patrols.
“China wants to shape rules before they are settled,” said David Cattler, a former U.S. intelligence officer and NATO Assistant Secretary-General for intelligence and security. “Early presence shapes future influence.”
China’s expanding presence and influence in the Arctic helps Russia now, but it might prove to be a problem for Moscow later, Western military officials said. Since the Cold War, the Arctic has offered Russia a remote sanctuary for much of its nuclear arsenal. Until now, only the U.S. could seriously threaten Russian bases or military assets there.
Chinese vessels operating north of Russia could complicate matters for Moscow, especially if the national interests of the two countries diverge and the current “no-limits partnership” breaks down. “Chinese operations in the High North are as direct a challenge to Russia as to any other power,” Stires said.
For now, Western countries are the ones sounding the alarm about China’s naval advance in the Arctic.
French Adm. Pierre Vandier, who oversees NATO’s efforts to prepare for future warfare, sees the possibility of China’s navy sailing from the Pacific to the Atlantic over the Arctic, bypassing more easily observed and defended routes through the Suez or Panama canals or around South Africa.
“For all of us, for NATO and the U.S., it means the threat that is in the Pacific is ubiquitous,” Vandier said in an interview. “If we have Asian forces in the Atlantic, it would be a huge game-changer. And we need to be prepared for that.”
Write to Daniel Michaels at Dan.Michaels@wsj.com and Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com