Аutor: Elizabeth Economy
Sourse: Foreign Affairs
ELIZABETH ECONOMY is Hargrove Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. From 2021 to 2023, she served as a senior adviser on China policy at the U.S. Department of Commerce. Before that, she spent over a decade as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of The World According to China and The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State.
When the Chinese cargo ship Istanbul Bridge docked at the British port of Felixstowe on October 13, 2025, the arrival might have appeared unremarkable. The United Kingdom is China’s third-largest export market, and boats travel between the two countries all year.
What was remarkable about the Bridge was the route it had taken—it was the first major Chinese cargo ship to travel directly to Europe via the Arctic Ocean. The trip took 20 days, weeks faster than the traditional routes through the Suez Canal or around the Cape of Good Hope. Beijing hailed the journey as a geostrategic breakthrough and a contribution to supply chain stability. Yet the more important message was unstated: the extent of China’s economic and security ambitions in a new realm of global power.
Beijing’s efforts in the Arctic are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. As early as the 1950s, Chinese leaders discussed competition in the world’s literal and figurative frontiers: the deep seas, the poles, outer space, and what the former People’s Liberation Army officer Xu Guangyu described as “power spheres and ideology,” concepts that today include cyberspace and the international financial system. These domains form the strategic foundations of global power. Control over them determines access to critical resources, the future of the Internet, the many benefits that derive from printing the world’s reserve currency, and the ability to defend against an array of security threats. As most analysts focus on the symptoms of competition—tariffs, semiconductor supply chain cutoffs, and short-term technological races—Beijing is building capabilities and influence in the underlying systems that will define the decades ahead. Doing so is central to President Xi Jinping’s dream of reclaiming China’s centrality on the global stage. “We can play a major role in the construction of the playgrounds even at the beginning, so that we can make rules for new games,” Xi said in 2014.
Beijing has positioned itself well for this contest. It approaches these frontiers with a consistent logic and playbook. It is investing in the necessary hard capabilities. It is partnering with other countries to embed itself in institutions and flooding these bodies with Chinese experts and officials, who then campaign for change. When it cannot co-opt existing institutions, it builds new ones. In all these efforts, Beijing is highly adaptive, experimenting with different platforms, reframing positions, and deploying capabilities in new ways.
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
American policymakers have only started waking up to the full extent of China’s success at building power in key areas of today’s world. Now, they are at risk of missing its commitment to dominating tomorrow’s. The United States, in other words, is not just abdicating its role in the current international system. It is falling behind in the fight to define the next one.
TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA
In 1872, the British sent a ship to retrieve the world’s first store of polymetallic nodules: clumps of ocean debris that can contain critical minerals such as manganese, nickel, and cobalt. But it was not until the early 1960s that scientists posited these nodules could have significant financial benefits. In the mid-1970s, the U.S. company Deepsea Ventures, a subsidiary of Tenneco, claimed that it could fill nearly all the military’s demand for nickel and cobalt by mining the Pacific Ocean floor.
Deepsea Ventures never got the permissions it needed to dredge up huge quantities of nodules, and eventually, it folded. But meanwhile, other international actors had begun negotiations over countries’ rights and obligations regarding the world’s oceans. These negotiations culminated in the adoption of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which came into force in November 1994. It included governance rules over the deep-seabed resources that lay beyond countries’ territorial waters. The parties to the convention established and, along with the world’s major mining companies, funded the International Seabed Authority to manage these resources.
China began its own research into deep-seabed mining in the late 1970s. Its scientists and engineers developed prototypes of submersibles and machines that can mine as well as survey the ocean floor. In 1990, Beijing established the state-controlled China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and Development Association to coordinate its seabed prospecting and mining in international waters. It built seabed mining capabilities into its five-year plans starting in 2011. And in 2016, Beijing passed a deep-seabed law designed to develop China’s scientific and commercial capabilities and to provide a framework for engaging in international negotiations regarding ocean floorresources. In the process, China created at least 12 institutions dedicated to deep-sea research and built the world’s largest fleet of civilian research vessels.
Xi has targeted the deep seabed as a priority area for Chinese leadership. “The deep sea contains treasures that remain undiscovered and undeveloped,” he said in May 2016. “In order to obtain these treasures, we have to control key technologies in getting into the deep sea, discovering the deep sea, and developing the deep sea.” China already dominates land-based global supply chains of rare-earth elements, and a lead in deep-seabed mining would only enhance its chokehold over these minerals. Deep-seabed mining would also advance another Chinese security imperative by facilitating the mapping of the seabed and the laying of undersea cables that can be used in support of naval and submarine warfare. “There is no road in the deep sea,” Xi said in 2018. “We do not need to chase [after other countries]: we are the road.”
When China cannot co-opt existing institutions, it builds new ones.
As China’s domestic capabilities have expanded, so has its role in the International Seabed Authority. Since 2001, Beijing has served almost continuously on the ISA Council, the 36-member executive body that makes key decisions about mining regulations, contract approvals, and environmental regulations. China supplies significant support to the body, including by submitting papers and commenting on drafts. It has placed its own experts and officials in key ISA technical roles, and it provides more monetary support for the ISA than any other country. It has positioned itself to exert greater influence in shaping the rules and regulations that govern the exploration and exploitation of seabed resources. Chinese firms have already secured five seabed mining exploration contracts from the ISA—the most of any country.
China is actively courting emerging and middle-income economies with its deep-sea capabilities, encouraging countries and companies that need Chinese-built platforms, vessels, or processing capabilities to align themselves with Beijing’s interests. China has established a research partnership with the Cook Islands with an eye toward eventually exploiting the seabed minerals in the area, and it is exploring a similar agreement with Kiribati. In 2020, in partnership with the ISA, Beijing established a training and research center in Qingdao to provide officials from developing countries with practical experience, such as operating underwater vehicles, and with opportunities for joint research. And within the BRICS, a ten-country group named for its first five members (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), China has sought to build cooperation via a BRICS deep-sea research center in Hangzhou.
But Beijing has also faced troubles along the way. Despite its cooperative initiatives, China is in a small minority of countries that advocate for a more accelerated approach to mining. According to a Carnegie Endowment report, in 2023 Beijing “single-handedly” prevented the ISA from discussing marine ecosystem protection and a precautionary pause on mining licenses. This places it at odds with almost 40 other ISA members, which support a pause or moratorium on mining until rigorous monitoring and environmental safeguards are in place. China has also not convinced BRICS members: Brazil supports a ten-year precautionary pause, and South Africa wants strong environmental frameworks and economic protections. India favors faster development but is wary of China’s use of research vessels for military purposes. And many governments in the Asia-Pacific, such as those in Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Palau, and Taiwan, are worried about military-motivated incursions into their exclusive economic zones by China’s deep-sea survey vessels. Although Beijing has not yet won the rule-setting battle in the ISA, it is not sitting still. It is investing furiously in dual-use seabed mining technologies—those valuable for both civilian and military purposes—such as autonomous underwater vehicles and crewed submersibles that will enable it to dominate commercial seabed mining and, as one Chinese military analyst wrote, attack opponents’ large ship formations and naval bases.