当然，北极航线对中国和俄罗斯北部之间的贸易尤为重要。而关于中欧之间的贸易路线，从上海经北极航线到鹿特丹的距离也比穿越红海和苏伊士运河的航线大幅缩短。
同样重要的是，它消除了大量潜在风险。过去几个月，由于也门胡塞武装在红海袭击船只，苏伊士运河的交通量大大减少。
在某些航道，比如东南亚的马六甲海峡，美国海军的存在感很强，而北极航线提供了另一个选择。
这就是为什么俄罗斯将中国视为开发这条航线的天然伙伴。尽管莫斯科雄心勃勃，但2023年通过这条航线的船只数量仍远远低于苏伊士运河。
俄罗斯国家原子能公司表示，俄罗斯2023年经由北方航道的货物运输量突破3600万吨。所运输货物中，液化天然气占一半以上。
该公司希望到2035年将这一数字提高到约1.27亿吨。这是一个非常远大的目标，它的实现要靠中国。
China and Russia plot course for 'Ice Silk Road' in the
Arctic
Moscow has a new ally in its efforts to keep the Northeast Passage
open throughout the summer months
Richard Spencer
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
