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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Li & Bertelsen
first 11 months in 2008. In a recent event, an international anti-piracy force thwarted the attempted
takeover of a Chinese cargo ship off the Somali coast by sending in attack helicopters that fired on
the pirates and forced them to abandon the ship they had boarded.
In December 2008 the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution for the first time
authorizing international land operations against pirates sheltering in Somalia. According to China‘s
official media, the Chinese government decided to send three warships to the waters off Somalia late
December 2008 to protect Chinese vessels and crews from pirate attacks. The Chinese fleet would
join warships from the U.S., Denmark, Italy, Russia and other countries in patrolling the Gulf of
Aden, which leads to the Suez Canal. Currently this is the quickest route from Asia to Europe.
Chinese Energy and Maritime Transportation Security and the Arctic
To recap, China is facing energy and maritime transportation security challenges from state and non-
state actors; and will be increasingly dependent on oil and natural gas imports to continue its path of
growth, which is the basis for the core interests of the Chinese leadership and perceived to be the
basis of its political survival. These security challenges and their effect on core interests are the
context of China‘s interests and possible strategy in the Arctic.
The Arctic Region as a Potential Energy Supplier
Recent geological surveys show that as much as a fifth of the world‘s unexplored but exploitable gas
and oil reserves may be in the Arctic (U.S. Geological Survey, 2008). This opens up possibilities to
diversify global energy supply, where the political stability of the Arctic is a noteworthy quality.
Climate change is an important driver in these processes together with technological innovation,
since climate change both makes new resources accessible and opens up new transport possibility
especially between the Norwegian and Russian Arctic and Asian markets.
The Arctic coastal states, the Arctic five (Russia, Norway, Kingdom of Denmark, Canada and USA)
refer to the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and its provisions on
economic exclusion zones and extended continental shelves to extend sovereignty as far as possible
over the Arctic Ocean and its seabed (Hong, 2012a). Equally, Russia and Canada claim the Northern
Sea Route and the Northwest Passage as internal waters. The Asian emerging powers are starting to
challenge these Arctic legal positions, also referring to UNCLOS, but with the aim of maximizing
the international space. Here, voices in these Asian states are seeking to build a discourse around the
Arctic as the ―common heritage of humanity‖. It is quite clear that there is a zero-sum game of
sovereignty versus international jurisdiction between Arctic coastal states and Asian powers. The
Arctic coastal states are seeking to use preconditions for Arctic Council permanent observership as a
tool to guarantee their legal recognition, while the Asian powers are trying to build a discourse
strengthening their access to resources, sea lanes and access to decision-making (Jakobson, 2010;
Jakobson & Peng, 2012; Jakobson & Lee, 2013; Lasserre, 2010; Wright, 2011a, 2011b, 2012;
Alexeeva & Lasserre, 2012a, 2012b; Blunden, 2012; Han & Wang, 2012; Sun & Guo, 2012;
Rainwater, 2013; Stokke, 2013).