Chinese and Russian geographies of the Polar Silk Road

Abstract

In June 2017, China formally incorporated Russia’s Northern Sea Route (NSR), an Arctic shipping lane, into its $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to improve transportation networks between Europe and Asia. While this marked the first direct reference to Arctic shipping within publicly available BRI policy documents, the Chinese government has been conducting infrastructure diplomacy in Russia for several years. Russia’s Yamal Liquefied Natural Gas project, located close to the center of the NSR, was one of the first three projects worldwide to receive funding from China’s Silk Road Fund, but there are several less high-profile undertakings, including bridges and pipelines across the Amur River and a high-speed rail between Moscow and Kazan, that also involve Chinese capital and expertise. This presentation will examine how Chinese infrastructure diplomacy in Russia operates, how issues relating to project type, geography, and scale affect its implementation, and what the experiences of Chinese infrastructure diplomacy in Russia suggest for other BRI projects both in China’s neighboring countries and the Arctic.