Beijing (AsiaNews) – China wants to turn the Arctic route into a regular commercial pathway between Asia and Europe.
Weather permitting, the Chinese company Sea Legend Shipping will inaugurate the first weekly container service on 15 August via the Northern Sea Route (NSR), which runs along northern Russia through the waters of the Arctic Ocean.
Later this month, South Korea will also undertake its first trial voyage, organised by the PanStar company, a test presented as an attempt to carve out a role for the East Asian country in a sector in which China is currently clearly ahead.
The Chinese service, called the China-Europe Arctic Express (or Ice Silk Road), links the port of Ningbo-Zhoushan on China's east coast to Felixstowe in the United Kingdom, with connections to other European ports.
The season will open with the Dubai Tower, a container ship that will pick up cargo from six Chinese ports (Dalian, Qingdao, Shanghai, Taicang, Fuzhou, and Nansha) arriving in Ningbo-Zhoushan on 12 August, based on the same transport model already used for routes such as the Suez Canal.
Some eight departures are scheduled for the 2026 Arctic shipping season, with the last on 3 October.
The growing interest in the NSR is linked to the progressive loss of Arctic Sea ice. However, less ice does not mean a safer route. Weather conditions remain variable and difficult to predict, and ships must contend with shifting ice floes.
Citing Veson Nautical, Nikkei Asia reported that 182 ice class vessels have been ordered this year, more than double the 79 ordered five years ago.
Some 85 per cent will be built in China, followed by Russia with 10 and South Korea with eight.
Alexey Likhachev, the director general of Russia’s Rosatom, the state company that operates the NSR and its licensing system since 2018, described the initiative as the first regular and stable container service on the route. In previous years, only experimental or isolated voyages were undertaken.
Sea Legend has obtained licences for seven vessels.
It is worth noting that the largest ship sailing the Arctic route, the Istanbul Bridge, has a capacity of 4,890 TEUs (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units”.
The TEU is the standard unit of measurement in freight transport that measures the capacity of container ships and terminals. One TEU is a standard 20-foot-long metal container (just over 6 metres).
The largest container ships currently using the Suez Canal has a capacity of more than 20,000 TEUs. Thus, the NSR remains, at least for now, complementary to, not a replacement for the traditional route.
Still, the NSR is increasingly attractive due to frequent attacks on merchant ships in the Red Sea, which have forced many carriers to circumnavigate Africa, significantly lengthening journey times and costs, and reviving the debate over maritime chokepoints.
Meanwhile, in South Korea, the PanStar is set to send a container ship on 22 August from Busan to Rotterdam, Hamburg, and Gdańsk.
The public tender launched in the spring by the Korea Ocean Business Corporation and the Korea Shipping Association saw major Korean companies, such as HMM and Pan Ocean, decline to participate; ultimately, PanStar (a regional operator specialising primarily in passenger ferries rather than container ships) was the only candidate.
The Polar Silk Road and South Korea’s interest
China outlined its Arctic strategy in 2018, when it defined itself as a near-Arctic state in an official document, and presented the Polar Silk Road project, aimed at boosting its presence in the region's maritime routes and infrastructure.
Many of the projects envisioned at the time, however, never reached the operational stage. Only smaller maritime operators are now moving to the commercial stage, while large Chinese groups, like COSCO, have maintained a more cautious stance to avoid being caught up in Russia-related sanctions.
For South Korea, interest in the Arctic route does not begin with PanStar's voyage. The East Asian country was the first in the continent to adopt a master plan for the Arctic, back in 2013, the same year that the Hyundai Glovis company carried out the first South Korean commercial transport on the NSR, chartering a Swedish tanker, the Stena Polaris, to carry a cargo of naphtha from the Russian port of Ust-Luga to Gwangyang.
Later, in 2021, South Korea’s parliament passed a special law to promote polar activities.
Currently, President Lee Jae-myung's government has made it a national priority, aiming for year-round Arctic shipping by 2030. The Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries plans to relocate to Busan, making it a logistics hub for Arctic traffic.
The government also plans to expand its fleet of icebreakers and develop the technology to build container ships capable of navigating through ice by 2030.
However, as some South Korean officials openly admit, a structural gap persists that will be hard to fill in the short term.
In fact, the Port of Shanghai currently handles more than double the total volume of Busan, making it hard for now to guarantee the cargo volumes necessary to sustain a regular Arctic service, like the one China is already running.
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