Satellites and Arctic Routes: How China Is Redefining Its Global Presence

Translated by Maria Pia Longo 

In 2025, the Chinese commercial space industry was estimated to be worth approximately $3 trillion, up from $118 billion in 2020. The exceptional growth of the Chinese space sector was also attested by the 92 orbital launches conducted in 2025, setting a new record for the number of successful space launches carried out by the country in a single year.

China's growing spatial dominance is vital to maintaining national strategic autonomy, allowing China to independently produce and manage satellite-dependent services for both civil and military use.

However, the Chinese race to conquer space is also essential for China's global positioning. Managed by the National Space Administration of China (CNSA), the Chinese space program has rapidly become one of the most active globally since its establishment in 1993, currently second only to NASA's space program in the United States. The fierce competition between the Chinese and U.S. space programs has allowed China to create a field of confrontation beyond Earth's orbit, within which the Asian giant can demonstrate its technological capabilities, competing in a sector dominated by American innovation for decades.

Indeed, in 2020, China completed the development of its own satellite navigation system, BeiDou, which features a constellation larger than the American GPS satellite system. The service has become a genuine tool of Chinese soft power: by selling satellite services to third countries, China offers an alternative to purchasing on the U.S. market, addressing countries and organizations sanctioned by the United States as well.

The U.S. ban on boarding Chinese citizens onto the International Space Station, established in 2011, sparked China's push toward building its own permanent space station—an objective achieved through the launch of the Tiangong Space Station, which has maintained a continuous human presence since 2021. In the same year, China also successfully conducted a landing on Mars, becoming the second country after the United States to successfully operate a rover on the planet. The current confrontation between Washington and Beijing is taking shape in the race to the Moon: following the U.S. announcement of the Artemis program in 2017, through which NASA aims to return humans to the Moon by 2030, China responded in 2023 with a new lunar exploration program that also foresees landing astronauts by 2030.

China's growing competitiveness in orbit has yielded a significant strategic advantage for the country, while also enhancing Beijing's appeal as an international partner. The position China has achieved in technological advancement is reshaping its alliance with Russia, another American adversary.

In May 2026, Moscow and Beijing signed a cooperation agreement for satellite technologies aimed at reducing dependency on Western systems and building a technological ecosystem parallel to that of the United States. Furthermore, these agreements announced the launch of a process to enable interoperability between Chinese BeiDou satellites and Russian GLONASS navigation satellites, which are crucial for navigation accuracy around the Earth's poles.

In recent years, control over the polar regions—particularly the Arctic—has become fiercely contested, primarily between Russia and the United States, two of the major players in the polar region. Due to melting ice caused by global warming, navigation through Arctic seas has become more accessible, opening new opportunities for global commerce and making control over Arctic routes like the Northern Sea Route particularly vital.

The possibility of reaching Europe and the Americas without passing through traditional maritime routes holds immense appeal for the government in Beijing. In 2018, it announced plans to build a Polar Silk Road, declaring China a "near-Arctic state" and signaling its interest in strengthening its presence in a region historically outside Chinese political influence.

The partnership between China and Russia extends into the Arctic region as well. For Russia, control over Arctic territory has assumed an even more crucial role following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in 2022, despite Moscow having initiated an Arctic militarization campaign as early as the early 2000s by reopening Soviet-era military bases and constructing new naval ports. For Russia, presence in the Arctic is a matter of national security, as well as a means to ensure control over navigation in an area that could see an increasing percentage of global maritime trade pass through in the coming years.

In a harsh geographical environment like the Polar region, satellite connections become essential—not only to ensure navigation and communications, but also to gather intelligence data and observe movements in the area. Chinese investments in Earth observation stations, such as the Yellow River Arctic Station in the Svalbard archipelago, allow China to use scientific research (the only activity permitted in the Norwegian archipelago, where military activities are prohibited) as a pretext to collect data useful for developing dual-use technologies, which are essential for securing a strategic military and technological advantage for China.

China's military advantage in the Arctic is currently supported by over 24 SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite probes. These enable the collection of Earth imagery even under adverse weather conditions or during the long periods of darkness of the Arctic night, gathering essential data for ice navigation and Arctic surveillance. Sharing Chinese satellite data with Russia provides the latter with a major advantage, particularly in ensuring the efficiency of navigation and military operations during a period when Russia must maintain constant observation of the seas to monitor the movements of other Arctic countries—all NATO members—that have excluded Russia from all Arctic cooperation since 2022.

China's technological acceleration and the gradual consolidation of its axis with Moscow are equipping the Eurasian bloc with a parallel strategic architecture capable of translating orbital control into a tangible military intelligence advantage on Earth. In this scenario, space and the Arctic no longer represent isolated sectors, but rather two contested frontiers whose supremacy is now inextricably linked. Far beyond the logic of technological confrontation and national prestige that characterized space during the Cold War, the Arctic demonstrates how the spatial dimension today defines a power's concrete warfare capabilities: Sino-Russian cooperation is set to impact both the balance of power between Moscow and NATO and the future routes of polar commercial shipping. For the United States and its allied partners, formulating a response equal to Beijing's technological advancement has become an indispensable step toward guaranteeing defense and containment capabilities.

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