The Arctic and Africa in China's Foreign Policy: How Different Are They and What Does This Tell Us?

• Author: Christer Pursiainen, Chris Alden, Rasmus Bertelsen
• Position: None
• Pages: 31-55

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Citation: Christer Pursiainen, Chris Alden and Rasmus Bertelsen. “The Arctic and Africa in China’s Foreign Policy:

How Different Are They and What Does This Tell Us?” Arctic Review on Law and Politics, Vol. 12, 2021, pp. 31–55.

http://dx.doi.org/10.23865/arctic.v12.2440

Arctic Review on Law and Politics

Vol. 12, 2021, pp. 31–55

31

*Correspondence to: Christer Pursiainen, email: christer.h.pursiainen@uit.no

Peer-reviewed article

The Arctic and Africa in China’s

Foreign Policy: How Different Are

They and What Does This Tell Us?

Christer Pursiainen

UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Chris Alden

London School of Economics

Rasmus Bertelsen

UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Abstract

The article discusses China’s policies in and towards the Arctic and Africa within a comparative

perspective. To what extent is China’s policy adaptable to different conditions? What does this

adaptability tell us about China’s ascendant great-power role in the world in general? What is the

message to the Arctic and Africa respectively? The article concludes that China’s regional strate-

gies aptly reect the overall grand strategy of a country that is slowly but surely aiming at taking

on the role of leading global superpower. In doing so, Chinese foreign policy has demonstrated

exibility and adaptive tactics, through a careful tailoring of its so-called core interests and foreign

policy principles, and even identity politics, to regional conditions. This implies that regions seek-

ing autonomy in the context of great power activism and contestation should develop their own

strategies not only for beneting from Chinese investment but also in terms of managing depen-

dency on China and in relation to China and great power competition.

Keywords: China-Arctic, China-Africa, geoeconomics, geopolitics, reg ional regimes,

China’s sub-global identities, China’s roles

Responsible Editor: Øyvind Ravna, Faculty of Law, UiT The Arctic University of

Norway

Received: June 2020; Accepted: November 2020; Published: February 2021

Christer Pursiainen, Chris Alden and Rasmus Bertelsen

32

Introduction

While regions such as the Arctic or Africa are important subjects of international

politics in their own right, sometimes to understand the challenges they face it is

appropriate to consider such regions in the context of, or even as targets of, much

larger global developments and drivers. One of these challenges is without doubt

the gradual but steady rise of China into the role of global superpower, which is key

to understanding the current and future roles of the Arctic and Africa in a broader

perspective.

The conduct of China’s foreign policy has been a subject of controversial polit-

ical and academic debate for over two decades. Is China purposefully challenging

the current global order, and will it eventually use its successful authoritarian state

capitalism to seek to shape the whole world in its image?1 Or is it a question of

an ascendant but benevolent great-power’s adaptation to the prevailing system, a

country striving to nd its global role in a win-win fashion, as China itself claims?2

Or perhaps China’s grand strategy is based on a nationalist urge to re-establish the

country’s strength and become a world power, while being particularly sensitive to

domestic threats of disorder and foreign interference?3

By focusing our discussion on the Arctic and Africa, we believe we are not only

able to contribute to debates on China’s rise in the global arena, but also able to

draw a much more nuanced picture of this transition than is usual in this context.

While the two regions chosen could have been replaced by many more, say, Europe,

Latin America, or the Middle East, we believe the Arctic and Africa reect illustra-

tive cases of what we call Chinese “sub-global” policies, allowing us to identify the

important causal drivers of China’s foreign policy in different contexts. Does China’s

policy in and towards these two regions reect a grand strategy, or does it consist of

a set of improvised regional foreign policy strategies without any common denom-

inators? What are the differences and similarities of the Arctic and Africa from the

Chinese perspective?

In addressing the above questions, we draw together some basic concepts of

international politics: geoeconomics and geopolitics; regimes and governance;

identities and roles. While not immersing ourselves in the inter-school Interna-

tional Relations (IR) debates, these three broad perspectives represent heuristic

angles that enable us to systematise the intertwined empirical issues for our com-

parative purposes.

Through the application of these concepts – in the spirit of analytic eclecticism4 –

to Chinese policies towards the Arctic and Africa, our approach becomes somewhat

more nuanced than the initial questions presuppose. In a sense, they tell three inter-

twined stories instead of one, and when brought together, they provide a holistic

comparative frame for understanding and explaining China’s policies in these two

increasingly important regions. Beside the empirical differences of these regions and

Chinese politics towards them, with our theoretical perspectives we can identify the