 Welcome to the first lecture of opportunity virtually on behalf of the electives department in the Arctic Studies group. We want to welcome you and thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedules to join us here this afternoon or from wherever you are. I'd like to first thank each of you for joining us and also our incredible team here at the Naval War College who made this event possible, our electives department, our audio visual team, our public affairs office, our events department. So thanks to each and every one of you for making this possible. This afternoon's lecture we're so fortunate to be joined by Dr. Emery Brady who will discuss China's military interests in the Arctic. She'll speak for about 30 to 40 minutes and then we'll roll right into discussion for about 30 to 40 minutes. So I'll ask that right now just as a reminder to mute your mics if you can. And if you have any questions during the question and answer period we'll get to those. But if you can input those in the chat function of your Zoom, that'd be great. And then we'll compile all those questions at the end and we'll go ahead and pose those questions to Dr. Brady so we can have a discussion. Dr. Brady, as many of you know, she's a specialist in Chinese politics and polar politics, New Zealand politics, New Zealand foreign policy, she's fluent in Chinese Mandarin. She's the founder and executive director for the Polar Journal. She's published 10 books and over 40 scholarly articles including her 2017 book on China as a polar great power, which is the basis of her talk today. And coming live all the way from New Zealand, which is 16 hours difference, time difference, is Dr. Emery Brady over to you. Thank you again and look forward to your talk. Tena koutou kato, greetings everybody. Really wonderful to be able to speak to you today. Walter and I have been in discussion about coming to speak to your university for a couple of years now. And this is a great way to do so. And I hope in future I'll have a chance to come and meet more of you in person because I think we can, I think, you know, there's so many, so I can give a talk, but there's a lot more can be drawn out from the questions and answers. So I am going to try and meet the huge challenge of summarizing some of the findings in my book, China as a Polar Great Power, which came out in 2017 published by Cambridge University Press and the Woodrow Wilson Center, which I'm a global fellow with them. And I wrote up the book when I was there. And actually, while I was there, I pointed out to the Wilson Center that they were doing a whole lot of Arctic and Antarctic activities, and they should be ahead of everybody and set up what I suggest is called the Polar Initiative. And they have indeed done that. And I see they're doing a lot of, they are in fact doing a lot of groundbreaking work in the U.S. in raising issues about the importance of the polar regions for U.S. security as well as the security interests of other countries. Because I think, as I observed when I was in Washington, living in Washington, D.C., that the U.S. and its partners have been distracted by other regions of the world and haven't, perhaps the focus hasn't been on the strategic importance of the Arctic and Antarctic. Or perhaps there was just thought that, you know, it was done and dusted, and the Antarctic Treaty had, the Antarctic region had been an area where there was a lot of diplomatic engagement in the 1980s because of the Cramera negotiations. It was the minerals, a treaty that would have permitted minerals exploitation that was passed, but then not ratified and then the environmental protocol was passed. So some of the leading scholars on international polar law in the U.S. said to me, you know, there's nothing going on there. But what I found, and similarly in the Arctic, it was believed, you know, at the end of the Cold War, then it's really as a sort of a bit of a backwater and then the U.S. has already got its security needs sorted out there and Russia and China are the main, Russia and the U.S. are the main players. But what I found in my research in the Chinese sources is very different positions on the Antarctic and very, and positions on the Arctic that had never been made public. So, and so, and there's always, you know, I'm also, some of my early research is on the CCP what propaganda system, propaganda is not a negative word for the CCP or other Marxist, Leninist countries, Shenzhen is the Chinese word. And so we could call it management of the public sphere, you know, the white because it's very wide where it goes. So it's always important to know about Chinese government messaging that there's a two track, at least a two track, you know, what foreigners are supposed to know and what's directed at the Chinese public. And then, of course, the internal discussion. So on the Arctic and the Antarctic on any of the public statements on that were a very limited part of China's intentions there. So the overall theme that I have highlighted from my talk is China's military interests in the Antarctic. And I draw your attention to a paper that I published with China Brief. Last year feels like a century ago. I bet you all feel the same when I looked at it. Was that really December 2019? It feels like a decade ago. And that was called Facing Up to China's Military Interest in the Arctic. It's not too long. So you're all busy people. You can read that and you can read it for free. So just go to the Jamestown website and look up China Brief and then go into the archives and you'll find it under December 2019. And I also recommend that you go to the MacDonald Laurier Institute. They also asked me to do something on the Arctic, China's policies in the Arctic, from the point of view of Canada's interests. And I think Canada's interest may not be too far. Well, there are some differences, of course, on, for example, the views on international shipping in the Arctic. But anyway, there'll be something interesting there for you. So if you just Google my name and MacDonald Laurier Institute Arctic, you should find that paper and that was released about the same time. So Walter's got some slides that I'm going to go through. So what I'll do is I'll run through the sort of background, I think that's important to understand China's intentions in the Arctic and as well as the Antarctic. Because I know that many of you who might be listening today, you're Arctic specialists and you think, well, that's what I'm interested in. But China uniquely, which is why I called my book China is a Polar Great Power, China is a Polar Great Power, they coined this term Polar Great Power. And it's part of their level of ambition that they use this term because they're of course the actual Polar Great Power is the US and Russia, because and you've got different capacities there. I mean, Russia's, well, you know, there's different measures of power, but China is part of that which really reflects their desire to literally to reorient the global order is looking at these areas of where there's international spaces where China can access and build on its power and the Arctic and Antarctic are part of that. And they studied Chinese scholars were given the task of studying various Arctic and Antarctic powers and looking at their capacities, looking at their policies, the history, what worked for them, a whole lot of due diligence and learning from that and adapting that. And the cover of my book is this map, the vertical map, world map, which came out, people might remember in 2014, there was quite a lot of media attention about China's new national map that had the nine-dash line on it, I've got a picture of it coming up further along. And but what people didn't talk about was in this package of maps published by Hounan Chulban Show, Hounan Publishers was the vertical world map. And this map is done by a really brilliant geographer in Wuhan who I went to interview who advised the PLA that their maps for their missile positioning was wrong, that they could save a little bit of missile power if they went via the Arctic and use different maps. And his maps have been used by the PLA and the China Oceanic Administration and now have, and they are part, I mean maps are always political, aren't they? So we go to the next slide. They're part of a literal reorienting from the CCP's perspective, a very ambitious global perspective. You know, what Xi Jinping's now calling the new order, new era. So you know, people in the United States and North America and in Europe, you're used to the Atlantic-centered vision of the world. And we're here in New Zealand and Australia and Oceania and China, we're being used to seeing the world as a Pacific-centered world. And in China's maps of the world, there's little New Zealand as the center of their vision. If you ever watch CCTV, seven o'clock news, we're quite prominent there. But if you go to the next map, you'll see, next page, we'll see a China-centered world. And you see the prominence of Antarctica here, like a white peacock. And the Arctic Ocean appears like in Chinese, the word for Mediterranean is a middle ocean, a central ocean, Zhongdehai. And so the Arctic here is, you can see it as a very different perspective, perhaps from where you're used to seeing it on global maps. And in China's imaginary of the world, the US is its, you know, backdoor neighbor. And you also, China's vision of the world was, this map is very influenced by the founding father of modern geopolitics, Mekinda, and more on him in a moment. And Mekinda, I'm sure quite a few of you'll be familiar with Harold Mekinda because, well, I hope you are because because his ideas are, you know, really interesting and important if you're trying to understand China today, but they were very influential in geopolitical thinking of, in the Cold War and in after World War One, he was trying to work out, he wrote his book after World War One, he was trying to understand why the countries of Europe had been constantly going to war for hundreds of years. And one of the, one of the breakthroughs in his thinking was he came up with this idea, he did a whole lot of maps that were different from the traditional ones that people were used to doing. And he came up with this idea of the world island. So you see here in China's vertical map, which is now one of the official maps of China, this world island. So you could take a benevolent view and see how interconnected we all are in this vision. And you can see how the oceans connect us. And you can see that China is at the center of this order. And of course, the Chinese, the word for China is Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom. So this is a highly political map and it is an ambitious map. And another feature of the map is, as I said, the prominence of the ocean. So when Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, immediately polar policies and the maritime strategy became much more important than it had been. And he's got a history more so than any leaders in awareness and interest in these issues. I'll just take a bit of an aside, actually, because I think it's quite interesting detail that his first ever role was in, he was the, his first ever job after leaving Tsinghua University. He was a cultural revolutionist. I mean, he was sent down the countryside when he was about 11. So he finished his high school at what you'd call middle school and then spent quite a few years in the countryside, but got to go to university in the early 70s. Imagine going to engineering school when you only had middle school education. It was a big struggle, but back in those days, they spent more time doing labor, literally digging trenches and things like that than studying engineering and other subjects. And that's where his, it must have been very hard, and that's where his saying about to, which is his foreign policy dictum, about be proactive comes from that time. Anyway, so he, because of who his father was, a senior Palais general, he got a job straight out of after university, not as an engineer, but as the personal secretary to Gumbiao, who was then the Minister of Defense. And Gumbiao was the leader when a fatal decision was made to buy some redundant submarines from France. Redundant why? Because they were too noisy for the job, which was to try and get under the Arctic ice and get a second strike deterrent for China. So Gumbiao lost his job because of that, probably also because of factional issues. And also she was Gumbiao's personal secretary at the time when China sent its first Antarctic expedition. And at that stage, they had to use the People's Liberation Army Navy to do so. And then they were hopeless. They, their vessels broke down, one of them broke down in the South China Sea. And the scientists tell me that when they were built, they're terribly difficult labor of building a base by hand. They had about 300 People's Liberation Army Navy soldiers standing at arms with their, my hands up like with weapons there as if the penguins were going to attack them and not lending a hand. And so he was there in those early days when they saw the redundancy of their own technology. And yet they were well aware, as I documented my book, of the strategic importance of the Arctic and the Antarctic, both for their own potential and what they were aspiring to do in the future, which is to become one of the dominant powers. And that's very clear in the literature of the CCP. But also in, you know, what we call the strategic triangle, I'm just writing a new paper on this at the moment. The, the CCP, the strategic triangle from the CCP's point of view was, it's not like a temporary thing. It's, it's perennial, the balance of power between Russia and China and the US and China just has to choose sides. So what's important to Russia and the US must then be important to China, because whatever's made the Russia and the US powerful may well be important to China. So as I said, Xi Jinping had personal experience at a time when China didn't get their polar policies right. And he built on the work that had been done, particularly in the whole era, where there'd been an increase in very significant increase in budget and polar activities. And it, but it really went into overdrive on Xi Jinping. So I think that's significant because that's always important to understand, you know, the role of the leadership and why, you know, things are taking off a bit more. So further on to the next slide, I want to talk to you a little bit of the framing that is behind China's thinking too. So the map, this is on the right, there's that picture of the nine-dash line map, the Chinese map of China with the nine-dash line that came out of the package with the, that new vertical map. But the one on the left here is one of the rare visual images of the island chains or three of the island chains. Now people in the media, when they talk about the island chains these days, they tend to lump them with China, but of course the strategy that the mindset of it comes from the United States and the era of John Foster Dulles. And the first and second island chains are literal, but the third island chain is metaphorical, going from the Aleutians to Hawaii all the way down to New Zealand and as far as Antarctica. And, you know, sometimes there's people talking about the advantages of authoritarianism, you know, that they want to say all cars off the street of Beijing before the apex summit, they can do it, whereas democracy needs to negotiate that. But there's disadvantages in authoritarian societies too. It's pretty hard to change, it's harder than it is, even harder than it is for our countries to change course on a strategy and change course on a mindset. So after the Mao era, there was a big rethink on China's maritime strategy and a real strong criticism of it because it'd been set very much by the Soviet view. And the Soviet believed that if we go to the next slide, this guy who you should all be familiar with, Alfred Mahan, he was an imperialist and his thinking on the, on maritime doctrine was not useful for China or for Russia. But in the early 80s, China, even when they didn't have the capacity to do anything about it, was looking to Mahan as the way forward and rejecting the Soviet naval doctrine, which had said that China should focus on its land-based defense and when it comes to maritime melee, have enough resources to protect its own near seas. So of course, Alfred Mahan famously or Mahan, I'm happy to be corrected if I'm mispronouncing him according to the way you all do in the US, he looked, he compared the rise and the contested power between the United Kingdom or Great Britain and France. And he looked, he wrote about, well, what does a rising power need to do if they want to become dominant in the international system? And here are some of the key points from Alfred Mahan's thinking. And China is doing every single one of them to the nth degree. So going back to what I was saying about the island chains is that, I wonder now, and I'll be, military specialists will be able to debate this, in the era when, for example, my countries just suffered a series of really serious cyber attacks, is a kinetic warfare the most important thing these days? And political warfare is incredibly damaging also to all our countries. So I wonder if China's massive investment in hardware, which was very much in focus on the Mahanian doctrines because of this responding to the island chain strategy, if that is a reflective of how things were in the 80s, and what was important in the 80s, for example, important to get an aircraft carrier, and so on. But regardless, that is the trajectory that they're following. And that's why, and that drives so much of their thinking. So if we move on, here's another important influence is on the next slide, Walter, is McKinder, Harold McKinder. So here you see his map of the world island, one of his maps. And he had the famous saying, who rules East Europe, commands the heartland, who rules the heartland, commands the world island, who rules the world island, commands the world. And the heartland for China is a different heartland than it was for McKinder. But this, again, is a very important strand in the strategic thinking in China for its vision for the Arctic and Antarctic and for the maritime domain. And when I was doing my interviews in China, I asked some of the polar strategists, like, how come you have to take another foreign thinker again to guide your strategy? I mean, can't you come up with an indigenous approach? It surprised me because they're so nationalistic, usually. And they said to me, there's only Mahan. Mahan is the, his analysis was really important for them. And add on to that McKinder, and of course, Dulles and the thinkers behind Dulles of the island chain. So if we keep going, please, on to the next slide. So, yeah, so I talked about the island chains. And then, of course, the hub and spoke defense pack. So China, the vision from look the way the world looks from China is it's facing those containment strategies that were set up at the beginning of the Korean War, all the series of military agreements that the US has or had in the case of ANZES. And then, and that's only been reinforced by moves to more alignment between the Indo-Pacific Command. And also from Dulles came this idea of peaceful evolution, which probably most people in the West have forgotten about, but which is used as the idea that more exposure, that one of the ways in which the Western democracies could undermine the communist state was to engage as much as possible and expose the citizenry to Western liberal ideas, for example, and culture. And that would steadily change to transform those societies. And this phrase, peaceful evolution comes up a lot in the CCP internal discussions. And they talk about hostile foreign forces repeatedly. So that's another part of China's vision of why they need to go beyond defend themselves, but create to break out of these contain the containment strategy and the island chains, which was keeping China weak. And what they want to be is a rich country with a strong military. And that's a full chunk is the saying in Chinese. So if we move on to the next slide. So now there's another obsession and the Chinese leadership is the fear of the choke point. So around about seven, between 70, 80% of China's trade goes through the state of straight of Malacca. I mean, most 75% of New Zealand's trade is going up there as well. But we don't have the resources that China has to do anything to try and to force any change. But these obsessions have led to looking for alternatives to that and the Belt Road Initiative is very much a response to that to find alternatives to the fear that China has in a time of conflict that they could their trade routes could be located. So that brings us closer to talking about the Arctic and the role that the Arctic has in China's security. So this just giving you the backdrop to thinking about what's behind China's big investment in infrastructure and the Arctic and Antarctic and if it's to engage with governments there. So on to the next slide. So these three key interest strategic interest identify comes out of research that Chinese language internal documents that I was able to have access to. I didn't just make them up. These are citations and they are in that order. So the top priority is security, both traditional and non-traditional security. And you know this image on the right hand side appeared on the cover of People's Daily in 2013, about October 2013. China was doing some saber rattling and they said you know we our missiles can target 12 US cities crossing the Arctic. And that was a rare visual example, visual kind of some information to show how strategically important the Arctic was in China's thinking about its military security. So another priority is resources and resources in the broadest possible sense. So China from 2014 to 2016 had a big study of social scientists and scientists involved looking at what are the resources in the Arctic and Antarctic and what is the governance structure. So basically what's there and how can we access it. And you know you might say hey the Arctic is sovereign territory but from the Chinese perspective even if the extended continental shelf claims were all agreed to what they would amount to was sovereign rights not sovereign territory. So there would still be things that China could access. And when it comes to Arctic resources China will pay market prices for that. And you can see that they are indeed doing so but access is also a resource access to being able to get to and utilize opportunities in the Arctic and Antarctic is also a resource for example being able to do strategic science in the Arctic and Antarctic is important to China. So on to the third category is science and technology and I'd really highlight Baidol since our theme is military. So on to that more in a minute because I mean you guys there's a lot of you who the military specialists I don't want to be speaking of Baidol and the role of that but I'm just giving you an overview so we can lead into questions. So we can go on to the next slide please. Yeah so Baidol it is. So China and Russia both participated in the rollout of GPS and they've got ground stations in their own countries of GPS but at some point they realized that they needed their own alternative global navigation system because of the military importance of GPS. In fact I've spoken recently to a senior Russian Antarctic official who's very cross about how they've got GPS stations in Russia and the US certainly wouldn't allow GLONASS stations in the US and so China's ambitious foreign policy in the Xi era is very much connected to the expansion of Baidol because and it's connected into the Belt and Road Initiative too there's a so-called digital silk road. So countries have signed Belt Road Initiative agreements with China and of course there's varying different degrees of what you've signed and my country signed an agreement to talk about it in MOA. Others in some the conditions of some MOUs are different from other countries but China's hope is that the countries who sign up to Belt and Road will have Baidol ground stations because that would obviously really help their accuracy and they also want countries to take Huawei into their 5G as well as 3 and 4G as they already are and people to take on Huawei phones because just as with GPS on our phones that provides micro information to the positioning, the global satellite positioning. So Baidol is very much in rivalry with the US GPS system and as I wrote in a paper in the Australian I think two years ago now there's a space race at the poles and for Russia and China as well as the US to have the state of the art system and China managed to get quite away with the development of its program by emphasising the scientific aspects of Baidol which indeed there is but the military aspect so they've got three ground stations in Australia which I'd like to remind them of. New Zealand has none and there is no Pacific country that has any unless the one the big satellite Dishon Tong and Embassy counts as a Baidol ground station. I don't know the answer to that and maybe someone can tell me but they are finding more resistance in these days to getting these ground stations as people will have observed. So that's a really important part to China's interests in the Arctic and Antarctic. They have ground stations in Svalbard as they're allowed to because they are used for scientific purposes but as I was about to say the military aspect to it was revealed in 2014 you know publicly revealed when PLA satellites were used to help rescue a Russian ice breaker that had been hired by a Australian scientific team who got stuck on the ice in Antarctica and that was the first use of this satellite system for China when it was coordinated by the PLA. The PLA is a very important actor and I would say from my interviews that actually the lead actor currently in China is expanding polar policies and activities in the Arctic and Antarctic. I'm nearly running out of time on my own schedule so if we can go to the next slide and then I'm going to try and give you time for the questions that I think will be really important. I've got lots of detail but hopefully they'll be drawn out in the question. So the nuclear deterrents is very important to China. Obviously they don't have a large amount of missiles compared to the US and Russia. You will have around 2,500, 2,700 nuclear missiles. China's is about 230 or so from memory anyway, small number. They say their policy is not first strike but they want a second strike and to have and so it was early on identified for China the value of having an Arctic, a submarine stationed in the Arctic hidden under the ice and like I said they've been you know they actually as well before Xi Jinping and his time with Geng Biao that this there's been this agenda. China has actually ever since the US escape surfaced above the Arctic ice. China Maldon said to Kristie if we want one of those and this and the Soviets said well you know we've got you covered and that was add that to the list of the the things that the Soviets didn't do right for the CCP because the Soviet you wouldn't share its nuclear submarine technology with them. So China from that according to the history of submarine making in China they started trying their own rudimentarily submarine program starting with wooden submarines apparently and then I said they bought some redundant what very expensive redundant ones what became in the early 80s which became this char class submarines and and the purpose specific goal was to combat US maritime power and so they've been steadily building up their program the latest news and about a week ago was that China and Russia are a collaborator on making a submarine which will be suitable for Arctic conditions and that's a really really interesting development to me because China and Russia's interests in the Arctic don't necessarily align and it's a they have a strategic partnership they call it and there's quite conditional support so another interesting development was early this year a Russian professor was arrested allegedly for taking plans or information about how to detect submarines under Arctic ice he was heading over to one of the polar universities or polar focused universities in China with those plans so I saw that as an indication that there are limits on Russia's cooperation with China in in the Arctic it's not full-hearted and a Russian military magazine last year talked about the possibility of Russia providing port support for Chinese submarines in the Arctic and proposed a Russia China air missile defense system for the Arctic of course Russia has been very supportive of the Belt and Road initiative in the Arctic and in order to open up the northern sea route so I it's not the same as in the the the relationship between the Soviet Union and China which was of course always fractures behind the scenes and in the era when the CCP was simply a was founded by the common turn and supported by the Soviet Union it's always been a difficult relationship I think now Russia doesn't want to see a dominant China and yet they are helping China to agree with this so if we move on because I think we can talk more about this in questions so China's been very active in trying to get in on the at the table of every Arctic and Antarctic connected governance body and they now do have what they call why you turn the right to speak on Arctic affairs which they didn't when they first applied to be a member of the or a observer sorry of the Arctic Council in 2009 but now because of this China ink approach to engaging in the Arctic on engaging on multiple platforms multiple societal cultural tourists you name it and also bilaterally with the different Arctic states China is an accepted stakeholder in Arctic affairs of course it started about 10 years ago with using this phrase that they were near Arctic state which is well it's obviously very controversial depends on your your geographic perspective on that but that's all part of China making sure that it gets a seat at the table they want to be part of any decision making and they want to be an acknowledged stakeholder in the Arctic and they are indeed these days have succeeded in that goal so on to the next slide so that the budget increases the very significant budget increases into Arctic and Antarctic spending and for a while it seemed limitless and you know people that I was interviewing in China just they just seemed whatever they wanted they could get out of the art the the treasury on our capacity expansion for new ice breakers new bases you name it and there on the right there you can just see the right of the screen you can see China's ice station in the Arctic they copied the so the Russians and the US on doing that and then the left there is China's very large base at Svalbard and China has a an extensive ice breaker program a development program underway this one on the the ice breaker you can see on the left was a Ukrainian cargo ice breaking vessel China has modernized it a couple of times but now they've got their own ice research vessel they have another ice breaker the China Oceanic Administration has another ice breaker which they sometimes send down to the Antarctic and they're building a nuclear powered one finally they'd planned it in 2014 it was proposed and then they didn't follow through because they're really worried about pushback basically the political risk and the fact that they are developing it now shows that China does feel confident that that their position and their engagement in the Arctic and Antarctic is accepted now and that they can get away with their furthering their agenda and it's very they the the all these new ice breakers are built to PLA specifications the China Oceanic Administration is under PLA is is is led by the PLA in a time of conflict and the new nuclear ice breaker is specifically or it's been discussed publicly that it could be used to if necessary rescue a submarine stuck under the ice up in the Arctic so it's so again connected to the nuclear deterrent's agenda but there is a change that's been very interesting in the shear and it happened before well before COVID and the budget constraints there will be under COVID so from about 2015 there has been a tightening on expenses on polar expenses so for example in the Antarctic China's fifth base which was should have been open by now according to the original schedule which is in the Rossi area very not in the flight path of the planes that fly to McMurdo the US space there that that Rossi and express will island base is still just a few containers and that's because the budgets and the money is just not there anymore so this is an interesting development I think because you know in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union they spent about 12% of their GDP on the military and if we add up the budget on the PLA with the what's called the we win the the stabilization other words political control social political control budget in China with Belt Road initiative I think we're easily going to get to 12% of GDP so and COVID's only going to make it worse so that's just a question mark there but I know you know what what does this mean going forward can China afford its ambitious art to get an Antarctic expansion however to go against my argument you have that you know you have country like North Korea that puts a lot of its resources into the military and you know other services suffer and that's certainly Dr Brady if you can go ahead and unmute yourself we had a thank you hang on go ahead we I can hear you we can hear you now all right cool we're good yeah hi Ministry of State Security or PLA or whatever that was hope you're enjoying the conversation okay next slide anonymous hacker okay so yeah the Arctic at present and the Antarctic at present they're all expanding let's oh well just one little thing here that picture on the right there a bit painful for the claimants states in Antarctica the triangular if you're used to pictures of the sovereign claims in Antarctica they're all triangles they don't match you know there's like the penguins and the the whales don't know about these triangles they don't necessarily match sort of the biosphere or anything like that well China has created this area that they were they actually humorously called panda during the international polar year and this is the area of it's an East Antarctica where China is doing what countries to do if you do you think that an area is an international space and they're they're naming they're occupying they are discovering making breakthroughs and discovery and this is in the this little triangle or substantial triangle within Antarctic territory of Australia which of course the US and other countries many other countries don't recognize but the Antarctic Treaty permits countries like Australia and New Zealand seven countries to make their Antarctic claims and other countries take a different view and it doesn't permit countries to make new claims in Antarctica however the China internal sources in the Chinese sources say that China like the US and Russia reserves the right to make a claim in Antarctica so that's just another interesting example of China's level of ambition and the research they've been doing on what others do in Antarctica what's good for the goose is good for the gander as they say so moving on because I really want to get to the questions now next slide please those are China's I'm going to read them out these are the kind of priorities in the Antarctic and on to the Arctic we have a similar set of priorities next slide China as I said wants to be a stakeholder seen as a stakeholder in the Arctic they've achieved that internationalizing Arctic governance will be helpful for China because that's more voices that will sort of weaken the influence of the Arctic players China's position is the Arctic Straits are international straits they'll be helpful if you want to send submarines through there and they are seeking access to Arctic mineral resources but they will pay market prices they say and people often bring up the comparison with the South China Sea and the Chinese sources saying it's that's different that's sovereign Chinese sovereign territory the Arctic isn't all right let's move on because I think we're right at the end now yeah that's it thank you for listening open to your questions perfect thank you so much Emery and we have tons of great questions as you can imagine I think we'll start off with the question here so in recent years China has tried to build its economic relationships providing financial assistance to to the different countries and especially to Greenland and Iceland the question is so what do you think about the possibility of an independent Greenland and then a Greenlandic government becoming friendly to the to the CCP administration and as part of that what the possibility of China establishing a military base in Greenland so that's a great question and you know what it there's another example that I would lead like you think about is in the South Pacific Southwest Pacific is French Polynesia and New Caledonia who also are or territories of France but they are and New Caledonia is having a second referendum in November on the question of independence and similar to Greenland which I have also been I've been watching and talking with people there officials there for about six years now you know they and with the the Danish government officials this it's quite a parallel situation there so the French and the Danes if the if the the Greenlanders and the people in French Polynesia and New Caledonia if they want independence and that's what the collective want then okay we will work with that if they don't want that then if they don't exactly want that continue on in a moral autonomy and support but the question in both all those three territories is who's going to continue to subsidize the society so the China card and I mean you might say why am I talking about the Pacific but this is related to strategic interests and related to the security of my country as well because whoever controls those territories if some if a hostile state controls any of those three territories it will immediately affect our security just as it was you know in Japan you had Japan and World War two and the Nazis the Nazi Germany was very active up in the Arctic in World War two also so who controls these crucial island states is really important to us and yet it's not a colonial era so we what we the view in New Zealand and Australia too is yes we want those countries to be independent and sovereign so not replacing one coloniser with another and those the view I haven't had the opportunity to visit Greenland and talk to a lot of people but I have talked to a few people who are decision makers and the view that I have found there as a New Caledonia was that they might have had some illusions about China at some point but they're not so idealistic about what China might offer anymore so you know there's a saying Modzedung had a famous to me he loved to scoff at others lifting a stone to drop on their own feet. Xi Jinping's foreign policy has done that he's taken off the smiley face mask and so I think that many countries are a lot more cautious about China and so I think that Greenland if it was into became a sovereign state or if it gets more autonomy we'll be trying to have a where it can have a constructive relationship with China and not turn into a new colonial state and I so I think that what the mentality of that states like the US and my country even though we're different sides that we all need to have with these emerging independent states is support them in their independence support them in their sovereignty and find the ways that we can constructively yeah be part of that and not try and tell them what to do because they'll push them in another direction but just be supportive and constructive of what their collective decision as a society is for their future. Thank you and the Russia-China relationships has attracted lots of comments and questions so and I'll pull it down to a couple but the first one you know what are China's views on Russia's assertion or sovereign control in the way that they view and control the northern sea route and does China view it in the same way that Russia does or they view it more as the US does as an international strait connecting two bodies of water along yeah this is one point we're Russia so we're China and US have the same position okay and and so Canada you know for Canada that's that's a deal breaker as well so it's interesting where you can well I mean you've got the US has got its own reasons for that on its position and the reasons that it has doesn't suit you know doesn't mean that you all have come and gone with China but yeah so that's part of the reason why Russia is wary of China but also you know they are you know what used to be called the yellow peril they are afraid of being swamped by Chinese you know the some populations like in Siberia are afraid of being swamped by Chinese populations so and you know and you could say well there's that part of you know Chinese government policy well we're border control is or lack of border control and you know they definitely don't want to have as I said to have a dominant China I was another interesting you know I'm not privy to all the briefings that all of you are but I do read the news and I read something that really intrigued me a couple of weeks ago that apparently China is also you know we're all experiencing China's use of our universities to take military technology the fact that China was doing that to Russia I thought was really telling you know obviously illegally not because they that they were they weren't they that was through what seemed like you know just normal scientific links or other kind of exchanges that China had was directing the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at universities in Russia to to almost exactly basically the same kind of stuff that they're doing Australia New Zealand in the US and other countries so that shows me a non-trust relationship and that shows me that Russia I mean Russia signed the Vasenar arrangement China didn't that's the arrangement on non-proliferation and so for example apparently Russia was very annoyed that China turned the Ukraine what was a Soviet aircraft carrier actually they claimed that they were buying it to make a casino and then they turned it into the Liaoning and so I reflected on that again is like so that implies well of course that that even though it was Ukraine it had formerly been Soviet Union I nuclear sorry aircraft carrier that there are I know it's a very unpopular thing to say but there there is some little bit of common ground there with Russia and the US and other states about your concerns on China and the limits on the relations with China however of course the Putin government is you know really very hard to be at least publicly be seen to cooperate with them at the moment but you do have some of the same strategic concerns about China I think thank you yeah and and so I would characterize a few of these questions under kind of an economic a political and military lens looking at the China-Russia relationship and from a political perspective and this question was actually raised earlier in our Arctic security course and and raised again here but to what extent might China and Russia kind of come together on the political front to to maybe develop an alternative framework or form to the Arctic Council I know I have some views on how how Russia might view that but but would that be of in China's interest in Russia's interest in what's the possibility of something like that happening well um China and Russia have partnered um they certainly partnered on they're partnering on propaganda for example or media cooperation um and and many other areas but I I I think that would what you know I in my book China China is a polar great power I one one chapter is all about the question that the US former assistant secretary raised about whether of state I raised about whether or not China was a stakeholder in the global order and so I look at and just broadly you know what is China's what are China's intentions going forward and what I found from looking at the Chinese materials and interviews is that China will like other great powers take advantage of the international system where it suits them and they'll work with it and it usually it suits them a lot of the time you know UN is fairly effective they've got the veto at the UN when they want to and um a lot of the time it'll you know it'll suit China for now but where it doesn't suit China they'll set up their parallel structures so the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a parallel structure that road initiative is a parallel structure 17 plus one is a parallel structure um so we uh but but I um I think that we again we see that the pattern that um China doesn't want to get its its wrist slept it doesn't want to go too far and get pushed back and so they're constantly watch watching as well what they can get away with so this is the time this I say this again and again in every talk we need the united front against the united front we our countries this the small and medium states um plus the US need to unite against what China is throwing against us and it's very difficult at the moment um to it's often um because there are I mean the thing that that buy will bind us is economic supporting each other economically and because state the United States very protectionist under your current government and EU has historically very protectionist it means that vulnerable countries like mine are are left are dependent on China and there's many many other examples but we can um we can collectively keep China uh being cautious if we are you clear about the risk and are united because they are relatively weak at the moment and um what we want is all the best way and to deal with this China's oh we've got some interesting stuff going on now on the screen um is um to collectively get to be clear about the China threat and to work on the to uphold the international rule rules based order in the multi-lateral system thanks amary so another question on kind of along the same lines of the China-Russia relationship uh kind of a two-part question one is you know we've seen China and Russia cooperate in the South China Sea and do exercises and training and operations together to what extent might we see that in the Arctic uh and and that kind of the second piece to that is and we kind of alluded to it a little bit but to what extent right to what extent might the the PLIN uh cooperate partner with the Russian Navy to do operations in in the Arctic but but also might Russia allow China to use their bases to project and you know use as a refuelling point or or whatever they needed for yeah and exactly that point was raised by um a in a Russian military magazine last year that suggestion we haven't seen it happen yet but um uh China's been invited to invest import and infrastructure development in the Russian Arctic so we're seeing um some voices exploring that possibility we have seen the PLA um dip its toes on the edges of the Arctic ocean famously when President Obama went to his first and only visit up to the Arctic in 2014 where he supposed well he went to announce his climate change policy it was supposed to be a big deal but the headlines were stolen by five PLA Navy vessels and consisting of three surface vessels an amphibious vessel and in a supply ship who made a like totally unlikely detour from exercises in Vladivostok they went all the way up to the Aleutians and they went up through one of those little straits and came down again just to show that they could and um a month later um they were on the other side of the Arctic Ocean doing goodwill visits to Denmark Finland and Sweden and at the time people speculated that they were going to come home across the Arctic they didn't of course because they couldn't they don't actually have the capacity to do so as yet and they've got to operate safely in Arctic waters they need to have accurate bathymetric charts they've got to have the ability to monitor Arctic atmospheric conditions and to utilize remote sensing to identify the thickness of Arctic ice they've got to have submarine personnel who experience and under ice operations they've got to have the submarines capable of navigating uh various choke points that there are like up in the Bering Sea and get there safely and secretly uh they've got to have a Chinese nuclear icebreaker and they've got to have access to friendly seaports and airports in the Arctic so that's a long list but I can see the like checking them off slowly um and there you can see the um also how the science is military related as well because people think oh you know they're just doing some weather observations on that ice station yeah that's really helpful for other activities so when I conclude my paper um that I did for China brief is the speak challenge which I think that is broader than just on the Arctic like how it's who it's not going to help you to completely you can't exclude China for the Arctic they're there now anyway but um it you know you've how can you have how can you how can you work out which partnerships with China are benign or mutually beneficial and which of them are forced multipliers for the PLA that's the core question I think and and the problem is that you know for example the Alaskan government when Xi Jinping was visiting with President Obama at Annenberg in 2014 he made another very unlikely detour he made a totally unnecessary stop in Alaska and met with your governor governor and so you've got local interests like in Tasmania you know and this this is there's a whole history that China's really taking advantage of with our market liberal economies where states are told just go and make some money and so Tasmania has been trying to make money as an Antarctic hub so they they're that one of the hubs for China getting well they're one of their main hubs are getting into Antarctica and you know Alaska will be trying is trying to make money out of their their proximity to the Arctic so how do we get the balance right between economic security and particularly economic security of our regions who often like the far regions like in the high north in the US or in Canada who have economic difficulties anyway how do we get the balance right of economic security with national security and if we're going to tell them no you can't partner with China you can't do all the stuff that they think is benign but the US government can see the bigger picture well what are you going to do to compensate them from the loss of economic opportunity so this is a big question these are big questions we're looking at you cannot just compartmentalize it to the military to address it you're actually going to look at your whole government strategy and approach to your economy thank you and and so we have a few more questions the you know secretary Pompeo made headlines during his speech at the Art of Council where he called out Russia and China how is China reacted to this how how has the the CCP have they been I guess to what extent has has their thinking or behavior or lack there have changed since since he made those remarks and and I guess the second part question to this is you know what can the US do to engage China without increasing the likelihood of of of of an of an arms race in the sense that where we're where the US is doing more from a military perspective and China doing more from a military perspective and so establishing those lines of communication so the first one is really China's reaction to Secretary Pompeo's remarks and how if at all has that changed their behavior and thinking well you know it was a little while ago that those statements were made there was probably a common in global times that's the tabloid so that's predictable but there wouldn't be any major change to China's strategy but it's really important the statements were made and it was very important in 2018 that my government in their strategic defense policy statement made the first public statement about military activities in Antarctica that weren't logistic ones you know military ones that potentially breached the Antarctic treaty and what it says about what kind of military activities you can do in Antarctica it is important to talk publicly about these things and say you know what's regarded you know what the concerns are also Jen Stoltenberg he also raised concerns about in 2019 about China's increased presence in the Arctic so your public comments are very very important and they will help to not just curb China but they'll also help to inform people in our respective countries and particularly in the those who engage in the Arctic and Antarctica might be engaging with China we need to educate our population about national security risk at the moment and be really clear not alarmist just be really clear so you know the more specific the better I think that about what's going on I you know I was born in the middle mid-cold war era baby and I now know from teaching my students how the difference in my education and theirs we in our newspapers and you know and broadly in our society we knew a lot about the the eastern bloc how it worked what its policies were what a gender while what the risk was you know we you know I grew up protesting against and nuclear weapons you know my country was really really worried about the threat of nuclear war and so we were quite informed about security risks in my generation and I think people are not really well informed and that has a negative impact on our overall security because China's engaging in this China ink strategy in Arctic affairs as well as an Antarctic affairs and more broadly than that so individual citizens can potentially be engaging in activities that are against our national interests and so Walter can you remind me the next part of the question yeah actually I'll pass on that question because it ties in to probably one of our last questions and I'll we'll transition here now to basically two questions kind of lumped in together one is not it's really along the themes of of gaining access and influence and gaining a foothold in the region so you mentioned science you know to what extent this China use science to do exactly that to gain a foothold and to parlay that into other areas whether that's economically or along the military front and then as part of that you know to what extent you mentioned the vulnerable and you mentioned citizens but quite often the indigenous peoples are often left out of the conversation and to me that seems like a vulnerable community so can you talk to that and to what extent China might you know try to engage or connect with them as a means to gain access and influence in the region yeah the um so China targets individual Arctic governments and it also targets the indigenous groups in the Arctic that's a very specific strategy and it's part of you know what the US would call political warfare or gray zone it's what the ccp would call united front work and so that's part of what I'm saying it's why it's good to have clear messaging from our governments and as well as you know particularly the political leaders I think because if the media starts you know if a media story comes out people might say oh you know that's some alarmist journalists or that's some alarmist academic but when our political leaders make factual um well-reasoned statements about matters of concern then um that that's a very clear signal and um so how to you know acknowledge the the autonomy of indigenous peoples in in the Arctic which are and they're they're obviously their connections across border um across borders at the same time as um warn them or to prepare them to upskill them of the risks or potential risks that could be in some of those engagements again I think that's through um factual public conversations and this was um and it's putting good information clear information in the public domain you know I because I studied the cold cold war era information campaign so much in the past and I studied them critically in the in the past I understand the better now um because you know they did have some people got I mean McCarthy as Sarah just says in the US is in New Zealand some people got blacklisted you know completely it was kind of it was a very broad brush um often but there were actually more specific concerns about certain individuals but there was this very targeted campaign from within the Five Eyes countries to to provide factual information about the eastern bloc to the media and that went on for decades and so we um should replicate that um with the factual information side of things I think and um I see that there's there is some really great research coming out of the US now and many think tanks on on lots of you know really granular aspects to political interference and you need to do that when it comes to China and the Arctic too and the hard thing and the thing that really makes me very very cross actually is a lot of people who talk about China and the Arctic don't speak Chinese and if you do not and they might be Arctic specialists and that special that that expertise is great you know value that I say you know we've all got a piece of the puzzle so we you know I'll draw on that when I'm trying to come up with understand what's going on more broadly but if you don't if you cannot access the Chinese language materials and read what you're not supposed to read what read what's not meant for foreign eyes then you really don't know what's going on in China you cannot take the white paper on the Arctic and other public statements like that as the complete picture and China is a poll of great powers based on 10 years of reading Chinese language materials and 10 years of interviews as well I went that many times to China as well as doing interviews outside China and and drawing on the secondary studies so I didn't cut this but the challenge is of course you know it's a big learning curve to be you've got to be a Chinese language speaker as well as know about the CCP party state system and how all that works and then add on the Arctic knowledge so teamwork I think is the way to go is the speed speedy way to go is combine expertise probably is the way to go but I have noted quite a few pronouncements by US leaders in the last two years on Arctic and Antarctica well Antarctic affairs actually where there's been a few little errors made and on little details like whether the Antarctic Treaty ends in 2048 and stuff like that so it's really important that messaging the messaging that is accurate and I think as I said as I began by saying attention has been on you know the Middle East and other areas of the world and the US and its allies and NATO in particular need to do the due diligence to and engage with the political issues of the Arctic and Antarctic again and make that investment ongoing because China prioritizes it and China has a global foreign policy and so in order to defend its interests in the US the US has to pay attention to what China's paying attention to well yeah and thank you for that and a quick follow-up and in this goes to I think what our last question looks like we're running short on time and that's you know we talked a lot about competition and potential conflict but let's talk a little cooperation when we certainly hit on cooperation between China and Russia but to what extent might policymakers think about ways to extend an olive branch to China and the Arctic what are some potential areas of cooperation I mean given your background and expertise and and the many folks that you've engaged with what do you think are some ripe areas for cooperation looking across the political military economic you know social scientific perspective yeah you asked me that earlier and I dodged it because I've been I have been a bit critical of what I've seen going on actually because I think it's not clear-eyed enough that's been my fear anyway my fear that the engagement was not very was perhaps not clear-eyed and it was part of that mindset that there was that I observed when I started doing my research that people thought oh you know it's all sorted we've you know got the Arctic Council we've got the Antarctic Treaty and the various other instruments of it everything's fine in fact I remember giving a talk in Washington DC in 2009 and a retired US State Department Antarctic because they tend to stay in the area for a while he you know publicly called me alarmist I'm not alarmist I would love to be wrong on China and the CCP I was I was hoping I'd be wrong that we're in a long 1930s and now we're probably about 1942 I don't think I'm wrong and and this this book it's based on what China says what the CCP says so the problem was that the people who the US has given the authority to engage in polar affairs in the State Departments they're not China specialists they're international law specialists and in the Pentagon I visited the Pentagon last year and gave a talk you haven't you know you're busy you're just doing so many things and you just don't have your because you haven't it hasn't been regarded as a priority you haven't got your you haven't got your own China Arctic and Antarctic military issues specialists like you probably have for Middle East you'll have all the you know people specific knowledge and then there's just the problem anyways that people are supposed to be generalists and they get moved around and you never get time to do proper research and all of that but that's why that's what academics are for and but then of course you know as I've observed in the US system you know there's no incentive for academics to do this kind of policy relevant research the political scientists are pushed to do stuff on methods and models and you know quite stuff that's really abstract for governments but you know academics will go where the money is so if the if anything can go through on this talk Walter encourage some dedicated funding for researchers academics who do have the time and expertise who have got the language skills the Chinese language skills and who can partner with an Arctic specialist to make sure they get the details right to do some research that will be useful to your government particularly you know on the military side of things because you know I can the stuff that I've done is not particular to the US interest and I don't have access to all the information about what the concerns are the US and what the capacity of the US is so I do really think the US needs to do its own research but you've got to do eyes wide open research so to come back to your question about engagement and cooperation we're in a I don't think we're really much in a cooperation phase right now but I understand you know even in the Cold War they still were talking to each other right and they had phone lines and things like that so as long as the cooperation is clear eyed and not naive cooperation I support it and also you should always know of course that you know China is not a monolith that we've been you know polar officials are a lot of the people that who work on polar policy for example they're environmentalists too but the national script is all about accessing the resources so you those personal engagements are really important for the long term you know you might not get an outcome immediately but we do still need to engage and know that individuals they might they might be saying what the government asked them to say but they have their own views as well so you taking the long view engagement even in this difficult time is has value and keep talking has value but it must be eyes wide open and understanding these kind of what were non-transparent agenda about China's military interests that I've outlined today and so thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and your time with us we really appreciate it if you're interested in viewing this video we will have it posted to our Naval War College YouTube page here in the next couple days and so we encourage you to take a look if you'd like. I apologize for not getting to all the questions but we try to reach and combine as many as possible and so again thank you very much Amarie for for joining us thank you to each of you for joining us and taking the time out of your day and so long from Newport Rhode Island. Cool and yeah thank you for the privilege of sharing my ideas with you and yeah being allowed to monopolize the conversation I wanted to I hope the chat doesn't disappear because I really want to read through it all and and see what everyone else is thinking yeah yeah we'll see it for you great yeah it's been great talking to all of you and I hope to meet more of you in person in future when when when this is all over whenever if it ever is going to be over who knows absolutely all right bye for now take care