China’s ‘Arctic Destiny Community’ Initiative: Conceptual Framework and Implementation Practice

This article is devoted to the study of the theory and practice of promoting the China’s idea of creating an ‘Arctic Destiny Community’ (ADC) in the Arctic region. The relevance of the study is due to the strategic importance of the ADC idea as one of the long-term objectives and the result of China’s policy in the Arctic. Given that China has been promoting the idea since 2018, the unexplored nature of this topic can be characterized as a gap in the Russian scholarship. In the 1990s–2010s, China actively studied and shaped its own perception of the Arctic through the national interests, research and economic plans, taking into account an accelerating climate change – warming – in the Arctic region. As a follow-up to the ADC, China is in practice forming its conceptual framework with supporting pillars (elements), which include, for example, the ‘Polar Silk Road’ Initiative, ‘near-Arctic’ self-positioning, etc. In this regard, this study is an attempt to comprehensively examine the idea of the ADC by taking into account two features of the China’s perception of the Arctic. Firstly, within the China’s perception, the Arctic is still a new region for Beijing, where China is a political ‘stranger’, but it is interested in participating in exploitation of Arctic resources and getting the advantages of sea routes as additional pillars of the country’s future socio-economic development. In this vein, the ADC is not only the result of China’s ‘perception’ of the Arctic reality, but also a reflection of China’s conceptual vision of ‘how to take advantage of the Arctic’ in China’s economic development. Furthermore, the Arctic as a distinct region of the international relations system is of interest to Beijing in terms of advancing China’s vision of reforming global governance. In this regard, a comprehensive understanding of what the idea of the ADC is will help us to conceptualize and understand how China’s policy in the Arctic will evolve. In this context, it is reasonable to consider the following factors when planning Russia’s strategy in the Arctic: firstly, what China is doing in practice to create an ADC in the Arctic, and secondly, what is being discussed at the expert level as a future conceptual solution and proposal for further development of the Chinese vision for the Arctic region.