Introduction
Over the past two decades, China has emerged as an increasingly significant actor in Northern Europe and the Arctic. Once considered geographically distant from the High North, China now presents itself as a legitimate stakeholder in Arctic affairs, specifically through scientific research, infrastructure development, shipping, and regional governance. The publication of China’s 2018 Arctic Policy White Paper, which described the country as a “near-Arctic state,” marked a major turning point in projecting Beijing’s northern ambitions. Through initiatives linked to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), particularly the “Polar Silk Road”, China has sought to expand infrastructure across the Arctic and Northern Europe while positioning itself within an emerging northern future.
At the same time, Northern Europe and the Arctic have undergone profound political, environmental, and infrastructural transformation. Climate change has accelerated the melting of Arctic sea ice, increasing interest in shipping routes, resource extraction, and new logistical corridors. Meanwhile, deteriorating relations between Russia and the West following the invasion of Ukraine have intensified concerns surrounding Arctic security, including fears of Sino-Russian collaboration, infrastructural vulnerabilities, and geopolitical dependency. The accession of Finland and Sweden to NATO has further reshaped Arctic political relations and weakened earlier assumptions of “Arctic exceptionalism,” which imagined Arctic cooperation as insulated from broader geopolitical tensions.
This paper discusses China’s role in Northern Europe and the Arctic through the interconnected lenses of infrastructure, geopolitics, and cultural flows. It argues that the Arctic is increasingly emerging as an infrastructural borderland where climate change, trade, tourism, and competing future imaginaries converge. In this context, Chinese involvement in northern infrastructure and connectivity should be seen not simply as reshaping geopolitical relations, but also transforming patterns of mobility, cultural imaginings, and understandings of what the Arctic is – and what it might become – in the future.
China’s Arctic Turn and the Polar Silk Road
China’s growing Arctic engagement initially emerged through scientific cooperation and polar research before expanding into broader political and economic ambitions. Beginning in the early 2000s, China invested heavily in Arctic scientific programmes, icebreaker capabilities, and polar research infrastructure, including the Yellow River Station in Svalbard. In this context, Beijing has consistently framed its Arctic involvement as cooperative, peaceful, and science-driven, emphasising climate research, environmental protection, and sustainable development.
A major milestone came in 2013 when China obtained observer status in the Arctic Council. Although observer states lack formal decision-making power, the position provided China with greater institutional legitimacy within Arctic governance. The subsequent 2018 Arctic Policy White Paper further consolidated this role by formally integrating the Arctic into the Belt and Road Initiative, specifically through the concept of the “Polar Silk Road”.
Recent scholarship interprets China’s Arctic engagement as a gradual shift from scientific participation toward broader political, economic, and infrastructural ambitions. At the same time, there are significant disagreements regarding the nature and implications of China’s Arctic presence. For example, Chinese policymakers frequently describe the Arctic as part of a shared global commons shaped by climate change, connectivity, and narratives of international cooperation. Here Arctic infrastructure and shipping routes are presented as opportunities to reduce transport times between Asia and Europe while diversifying global trade networks and strengthening China-Russia cooperation, especially along the Northern Sea Route.
However, many Western and Nordic perspectives interpret China’s Arctic engagement through the lens of strategic competition, infrastructural dependency, and geopolitical influence. Critical scholarship highlights tensions between China’s cooperative rhetoric and the material realities of commercial expansion, logistics development, and emerging infrastructural corridors. As discussed below, debates surrounding infrastructure and the Polar Silk Road reveal not only competing economic visions of Arctic connectivity, but also broader struggles over the future political, cultural, and geopolitical character of the Arctic itself.
Northern Europe as an Infrastructure Frontier
Northern Europe and the Arctic have increasingly become sites of infrastructural connectivity and imagination. Across the region, ports, railways, digital cables, energy systems, logistics corridors, and shipping routes are reshaping how states and corporations envision future mobility and development in the High North. China’s involvement in these landscapes has increased dramatically over the past decade, becoming deeply entangled with questions of sovereignty, environmental change, and competing visions of Arctic futures.
This can be seen most clearly in the development of the Polar Silk Road, China’s vision for integrating northern shipping routes, infrastructure corridors, resource extraction, and logistical networks into the broader Belt and Road Initiative. Chinese firms and investors have shown growing interest in transport corridors, ports, mining, telecommunications infrastructure, and energy projects across the Nordic, Russian, and broader Circumpolar region. Well-known examples include the Yamal LNG project in the Russian Arctic, Chinese interests in rare earth and mining projects in Greenland, and growing engagement in telecommunications and satellite infrastructure. Together, these projects position the Arctic not as a remote periphery but as an emerging corridor of global trade, energy extraction, and geopolitical connectivity.
Roads, railways, ports, and logistics systems are never simply neutral technical objects: they function as political technologies that reorganise territory, mobility, and cultural imagination. This applies strongly to the Arctic, where Chinese involvement in mining, telecommunications, shipping, and digital infrastructure generates concerns surrounding sovereignty, infrastructural dependency, and control over emerging northern corridors.
One of the clearest examples is the proposed Arctic Railway linking northern Finland to Kirkenes in northern Norway. Initially promoted as part of broader Eurasian connectivity, the project promised major investment in deep-port infrastructure in Kirkenes, new logistical corridors connecting Northern Europe with Asian markets, and the possibility of integrating Arctic maritime routes with continental rail networks stretching across Eurasia. Supporters framed the railway as a transformative development opportunity for the European High North, capable of increasing trade flows, reducing shipping times between Asia and Europe via the Northern Sea Route, and positioning Kirkenes as a strategic Arctic logistics hub linking sea, rail, and energy infrastructures. However, the project also generated controversy surrounding Sámi land rights, environmental concerns, economic viability, and fears of strategic dependency before eventually stalling.
Infrastructure projects do more than move goods and people: their anticipation reshape social and ecological relations long before many projects are ever realised. The proposed Arctic Railway is not simply an economic or logistical proposal, but a speculative geopolitical project through which competing actors shape mobility, trade, sovereignty, and northern development. Even in suspension, such projects generate new political imaginaries, anxieties, and anticipatory futures that continue to influence local planning, environmental politics, and regional senses of possibility. In this sense, China’s Arctic engagement reveals how infrastructure operates simultaneously as material construction, political strategy, and a way of imagining and producing future Arctic worlds.
Tourism, Worlding, and Arctic Imaginaries
Tourism has emerged as an increasingly important dimension of China’s northern engagement. Beyond shipping routes and resource extraction, Arctic tourism imaginaries increasingly position the High North as a space of adventure, ecological purity, and future connectivity. In recent years, Chinese tourism has expanded rapidly across Northern Europe and the Arctic. Chinese visitors travel extensively to destinations including northern Norway, Iceland, Finland, Greenland, and the Russian Arctic, often through organised package tours centred on Northern Lights tourism, polar landscapes, Indigenous culture, winter experiences, and wildlife encounters. Iceland alone has seen dramatic growth in Chinese tourism since the 2010s, while northern Norway experiences significant numbers of Chinese visitors connected to Arctic branding and winter tourism economies. At the same time, Chinese tourism companies, investors, and state actors increasingly promote Arctic travel as part of broader narratives surrounding the Polar Silk Road, northern connectivity, and China’s identity as a “near-Arctic state.”
In Kirkenes, a border town in northern Norway, Chinese tourism became closely entangled with wider imaginaries surrounding the Polar Silk Road and anticipated Chinese investment. Prior to COVID-19, thousands of Chinese tourists visited Kirkenes annually as part of organised Arctic tours linking Northern Lights tourism, Sámi cultural experiences, and “King Crab Safaris,” where visitors travelled by snowmobile and boat to consume the invasive king crab that now symbolises the region.
Yet tourism here extends beyond economic activity alone. Local actors increasingly connected Chinese tourism with broader expectations surrounding ports, railways, shipping corridors, and future Chinese investment. Even as projects such as the proposed Arctic Railway stalled, their anticipation continued to shape local planning, speculation, and senses of possibility. Tourism therefore became embedded within wider infrastructural imaginaries through which Arctic futures were anticipated, narrated, and politically negotiated. In this sense, tourism itself becomes a form of speculation through which imagined Arctic futures acquire material and political force. Arctic tourism thus forms part of a broader process through which the Arctic is narrated, anticipated, and reimagined through infrastructure, mobility, and cultural flows.
Interestingly, these Arctic imaginaries are not confined to Northern Europe but also feed back into China itself. Along the Sino-Russian border, the Polar Silk Road has become intertwined with efforts to reimagine China’s northern borderlands as culturally and ecologically connected to the Circumpolar North. In this context, ethnic minority settlements, museums, and tourism infrastructure have been redeveloped around themes of “Chinese Siberia”, reindeer herding culture, northern wilderness, and Arctic identity.
Rather than simply projecting outward into the Arctic, these processes also reshape understandings of China’s own northern frontiers and borderlands. Arctic imaginaries increasingly circulate through museums, tourism campaigns, heritage exhibitions, social media, and transnational exchanges between Ewenki, Sámi, and Siberian Indigenous groups, producing new forms of cultural connection, identification, and anticipation across the Polar Silk Road. In this sense, infrastructure operates not only through material corridors and logistics systems, but also through heritage-making, tourism imaginaries, and forms of cultural diplomacy that symbolically connect China’s northern borderlands to wider Circumpolar futures.
Conclusion
China’s growing role in Northern Europe and the Arctic reflects wider transformations in the global political, economic, environmental, and cultural order. Through scientific cooperation, infrastructure investment, shipping ambitions, tourism development, and Arctic diplomacy, China has sought to position itself as an increasingly important actor in the future development of the High North. At the same time, this engagement has become increasingly contested amid rising geopolitical tensions, climate change, and shifting security dynamics.
This review has argued that China’s Arctic presence cannot be understood solely through the frameworks of economics, resource extraction, or strategic rivalry. Rather, Northern Europe and the Arctic are increasingly emerging as infrastructural borderlands where environmental transformation, mobility, tourism imaginaries, and cultural flows intersect. Infrastructure projects are not merely technical developments but central components in the production of new forms of Arctic connectivity and imagined northern futures.
Seen in this light, the Arctic is no longer imagined simply as a remote frontier, but as a space of circulation in which infrastructure, tourism, heritage, media, and geopolitical ambition become deeply intertwined. China’s northern engagement therefore demonstrates how infrastructure operates simultaneously as material construction, political strategy, and future-making imagination through which competing actors seek to shape mobility, connectivity, and the future political and cultural worlds of the Arctic itself.
Richard Fraser
Professor
UiT Arctic University of Norway
Norway
