By: Meia Nouwens and Veerle Nouwens
October 16, 2024
The maritime domain continues to be an important arena for great power competition. Countries in the Indo-Pacific are seeking cooperative ways to counter shared challenges, including Chinese assertiveness in the gray zone. China has expanded its own maritime cooperation, with Russia as a consistent partner in this effort. China and Russia’s 2023 agreement on maritime law enforcement cooperation presents a new dimension of their deepening maritime cooperation, and, as such, a new potential challenge for like-minded countries to contend with.
Competition in the Maritime Domain: From Navies to Coast Guards
China’s shipbuilding pace has caused growing concerns across the Indo-Pacific and alarm in the United States and Europe. Indeed, China’s defense industrial base has shown immense capability to produce surface, subsurface, and uncrewed vessels at rates that few can compete with. In addition to the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) becoming the world’s largest navy (by number of vessels), the China Coast Guard (CCG) is the largest coast guard in the world and provides China’s leadership with a formidable tool for power projection. As Bonny Lin, et al. have argued, the CCG already plays an important role in gray zone coercion in the South China Sea and East China Sea, and it will likely be an important component of any Taiwan scenario, such as an economic quarantine.
Regional navies and coast guards are grappling with how to respond to these gray zone activities without causing further escalation. In 2023, the U.S. Coast Guard announced plans to increase maritime patrols and training activities in the Indo-Pacific. More recently, on October 1, 2024, the U.S., Philippines, and Japanese coast guards agreed to boost cooperation after a Quad meeting. Through ASEAN’s Coast Guard Forum, several Southeast Asian nations are also seeking to enhance cooperation and communication to combat shared challenges and threats such as human trafficking and illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
Public Signals Toward China-Russia Coast Guard Cooperation
China has begun to expand its own maritime law enforcement cooperation, presenting a new dynamic within the deepening Russia-China security and defense relationship. In April 2023, a delegation from the CCG held a high-level meeting in Murmansk, Russia, with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) on strengthening maritime law enforcement cooperation. The two sides signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for maritime law enforcement cooperation and agreed to promote this cooperation on the principles of “good-neighborliness, friendship, and win-win cooperation, and jointly build[ing] a maritime community with a shared future.” The Chinese delegation was led by CCG Director General Yu Zhong and First Deputy FSB Director and Chief of Border Service General Vladimir Grigorovich Kulishov.
Despite the official announcement, details were scarce, and the MoU went largely under the radar. In April 2024, on the one-year anniversary of signing the MoU, the FSB Border Guard Service invited a CCG working group to Vladivostok to participate in China-Russia Coast Guard working-level talks. According to China’s Ministry of National Defense (MND), the two sides “conducted research and consultation on the exchange and cooperation activities planned for this year, carried out operational seminars, tabletop exercises, sea surveys, and other activities.” The two sides also reportedly discussed how to strengthen practical cooperation. Again, no details were provided about what these scenarios or research entailed, and the meeting gained little public attention.
In September and October 2024, however, China and Russia demonstrated the first examples of this practical cooperation. From September 16-20, CCG vessels Meishan and Xiushan (each 3,000-tonne) sailed to Peter the Great Gulf in the Sea of Japan (also known as the East Sea) to conduct drills with Russian coast guard vessels. Chinese social media accounts noted that this was the first time this type of cooperation had taken place. The two coast guards held drills including “maritime security threat crackdown,” maritime rescue, and “joint patrols” in the northern Pacific Ocean. Other reports add that the drills tested personnel with “interception of suspected criminal ships and firefighting.” The joint patrol took the two sides’ vessels close to the Arctic, and on October 2, the Meishan entered the Arctic Sea as part of a joint patrol with Russian coast guard vessels.
Purposes of China-Russia Coast Guard Cooperation
The dearth of details on China-Russia coast guard cooperation raises questions about its ultimate purpose.
China’s MND repeated its common refrain that the drills and patrols “are not aimed at any third party and are unrelated to the current international and regional situations.” However, it is likely that they are actually intended to serve as political signals to the United States and its allies. The joint coast guard exercises and patrols were timed to follow just two months after Russian and Chinese bombers flew together in international airspace near Alaska and conducted naval exercises near Japan as part of the Ocean-2024 drills. This follows a broader trend of China-Russia cooperation in the maritime and aerial domain increasing since starting at a low base in the early 2010s.
There is likely also a practical purpose for coast guard cooperation between Russia and China. While not new, China’s engagement in the Arctic has accelerated under Xi Jinping, with China attaining permanent observer status at the Arctic Council in 2013 and Xi declaring China’s ambition to become a “polar great power” in 2014. The following year, China identified the polar regions as one of its new strategic frontiers, which shows it shifting strategic calculus on the Artic. In 2018, China launched its Arctic Policy White Paper and Polar Silk Road plan, which call for exploring resources and shipping opportunities in the Arctic, which could become more feasible in the future due to climate change.
More recently, in August 2024, Chinese Premier Li Qiang and Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishutin signed a joint communique to develop Arctic shipping routes. In addition to their bilateral cooperation on polar ship technology and icebreaker deployments, practical coast guard cooperation in this area could help both countries safeguard the Northern Sea Route. This could include protecting each other’s future commercial passages through this route in the event of crises or when in need of rescue.
There could also be a case for both countries’ coast guards to play a role in projecting power in the Arctic as part of competition with the United States and its Arctic allies. Washington and its allies recently announced a trilateral icebreaker coalition effort, known as ICE Pact, between the United States, Finland, and Canada. China’s cooperation with Russia therefore could represent a response to this as well as transferring lessons learned from observations of U.S. and partner country cooperation in the Indo-Pacific to Chinese and Russian activity in the Arctic.
Bilateral maritime law enforcement cooperation could play a role in pre-empting future problems within the China-Russia relationship when it comes to increasing Chinese activity in the Arctic. For now, despite China’s Polar Silk Road ambitions, Russia still holds significant advantages over China in the area along the Northern Sea Route and in its control over the Russian Arctic Zone through which the route passes. By promoting joint coast guard cooperation that could be applied to the Arctic, China may seek to lay the groundwork for enhancing its presence and activity in the region moving forward.
Though there is no direct indication of this in any official text, the Chinese and Russian coast guard cooperation could play a role in supporting Chinese territorial claims in East Asia. As is the case in other China-Russia communiques and leader statements, the communique of August 2024 mentioned a pledge to support each other’s mutual sovereignty—with Russia opposing any form of independence for Taiwan and Beijing supporting Russia’s territorial integrity.
The CCG would likely play a leading role in a Taiwan quarantine—an operation by which China would seek to assert its legal and administrative ability to control commercial trade in and out of Taiwan. In such a scenario, it could be possible for the Russian coast guard to play a role in supporting Beijing’s aims. It is unlikely this would be done directly through joint enforcement of a quarantine of Taiwan, as the involvement of an external coast guard would contradict Beijing’s likely narrative that this is a domestic legal issue.
However, it is possible that the Russian coast guard could conduct activity farther from China’s shores and Taiwan as a supporting role to Beijing. For example, the Russian coast guard could conduct gray zone operations in the Sea of Japan or elsewhere to frustrate or block assistance if the United States requested help from other regional partners’ air and maritime law enforcement assets. China-Russia cooperation in this context would provide China with additional assets and a line of forward deployed support while the CCG primarily focuses on enacting a quarantine around Taiwan.
Russia has considerable assets in the region. Its coast guard’s Pacific Fleet comprises 25 ocean-going vessels, ranging from 2700-tone patrol ships, such as the Okean, to 600-tonne patrol craft such as the Okhotnik. It also has smaller craft at its disposal.
Ultimately, however, the CCG is the largest coast guard in the world and does not require Russian assets to undertake a quarantine of Taiwan. Beijing has at its disposal over 142 oceangoing and offshore patrol vessels and over 400 smaller vessels across its various coast guard fleets. Nevertheless, cooperation between China and Russia would showcase to other regional powers that it does not act alone.
Complicating the Pacific and Arctic Maritime Domain
As China-Russia cooperation in the Indo-Pacific strengthens, regional countries and the United States will now need to contend with broader consequences of these deepening ties in new ways. While much attention has been paid to bilateral naval exercises and aerial patrols in the Sea of Japan and Northern Pacific, the two countries now look set to potentially increase cooperation in the gray zone through possible coast guard cooperation.
At the very least, the agreements on maritime law enforcement cooperation between Russia and China are potentially a way for the two countries to pre-empt or resolve tensions within their bilateral relations in contested regions like the Arctic maritime domain. Should the two extend this cooperation to coordinated activity around Taiwan in the event of a crisis, the United States and its partners and allies in the region will face an added challenge to maintaining regional stability.
Meia Nouwens is a senior fellow for Chinese Security and Defence Policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). Veerle Nouwens is executive-director of IISS-Asia.