An Ignoble Experiment: Friends in high places

How an icy shipping route at the top of the world is bringing China and Russia together

By Simone McCarthy, Rosa de Acosta, Isaac Yee

Photo Illustration by Rosa de Acosta/CNN/Getty Images/Reuters

Ice was still heavy on the water when the hulking Christophe de Margerie tanker set off on the first journey of the season along the Northern Sea Route in late May.

It had just stopped at a port connected to Arctic LNG-2, a US-sanctioned liquefied natural gas facility deep in the Russian Arctic, shipping data shows. From there, led most of the way by an icebreaker, the tanker lumbered through thousands of miles of Arctic waters and the Bering Sea.

Its roughly two-week trip ended at the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East, where the tanker slipped into a secluded bay that used to be home to a Soviet military settlement.

There, satellite imagery reviewed by CNN shows the Christophe de Margerie sidled up against a sprawling floating storage unit, in a formation typical of ship-to-ship cargo transfers. The tanker appeared to unload its blacklisted cargo into the unit, before beginning its journey back to the Arctic, Marine Traffic data shows.

Bound in impassible ice for much of the year and navigable without icebreakers for just a short summer window, the Moscow-controlled Northern Sea Route (NSR) is a controversial artery cutting through a region that’s increasingly cast as a new arena of great-power rivalry.

A CNN analysis of shipping data compiled by the Norway-based Centre for High North Logistics shows that, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, international transit along the route has been dominated by trade with one foreign player: China.

The trade – buttressing Russia’s wartime economy and boosting China’s energy security – comes alongside expanding Chinese shipping operations in the area, and growing concern in the West that China’s footprint there could foreshadow future military use.

Illustration by Leah Abucayan/CNN/Getty

The cost of joining China’s biggest and most powerful club

She was about to marry the love of her life, a foreign man she met at an overseas airport, who’d asked for her number and quickly followed up.

But instead of congratulating their long-time colleague, her co-workers, under the orders of their department head, urged her to think again.

Was he worth her losing her job?

Along with millions of other Chinese government employees, the woman, whose name was not disclosed due to the sensitivity of the matter, is bound by a long-standing rule that bans civil servants, or anyone who possesses “significant secrets,” from marrying foreigners.

And it’s not just marriage. Since Chinese leader Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, many aspects of personal life for members of the Communist Party or the state sector, from divorce to travel and social activities, have come under increasing scrutiny.

It’s part of Xi’s attempt to mitigate risks to national security and to stamp out corruption – and for tens of millions of state workers, it creates a constant tension between their right to a personal life and party loyalty.

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“They see this very much as part of their close cooperation.”

– Kjell Stokvik, managing director of the Centre for High North Logistics at Norway’s Nord University, on how the Moscow-controlled Northern Sea Route is bringing China and Russia together