The West’s strategy to contain China behind island chains risks being bypassed – China could gain free access to the Pacific by recovering territory lost to Russia in the 19th century. This may not be imminent, but it’s increasingly plausible as Russia weakens and becomes ever more dependent on China, and it could happen with little or no warning.
If China held the Pacific coast north of North Korea, including the port of Vladivostok, its naval forces could reach the Pacific free of current chokepoints and monitoring. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan would face simultaneous strategic exposure across their defences, undersea cables and sea routes. Repossession of the lost Russian Far East would also give China maritime access to the Arctic, as well as control over critical mineral deposits central to the global technology supply chain.
China lost more than 1 million square km of Pacific coastline to Russia under the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and the Convention of Peking in 1860. The territory runs north of North Korea to the Sea of Okhotsk. Its crown is Vladivostok, Russia’s only Pacific naval base east of Sakhalin.
The lands were home to Tungusic peoples before a weakened Qing China was forced to cede the territory through what it calls the unequal treaties. The Soviet Union promised to return it but didn’t. A border clash in 1969 and a friendship treaty in 2001 were meant to settle the matter, but they didn’t.
Chinese maps published as recently as 2023 labelled Vladivostok and nearby cities by their Chinese names, prompting sharp protests from Moscow. A leaked 2025 Russian Federal Security Service report, cited by The New York Times, suggests the Kremlin is acutely aware of the risk.
Beijing has never renounced the claim. It is simply waiting for the moment the cost of recovery falls below the cost of restraint.
The West has monitored China’s naval movements for decades, seeking to constrain its access to the open ocean. Since 2005, American and Japanese surveillance have used the Fish Hook system – a network of hydrophone arrays, patrol aircraft and ship-based sensors – to track submarines and surface vessels through the East and South China seas. Its key chokepoints are in the south: the Miyako, Osumi and Tsushima straits.
The Russian Far East coast sits north of this architecture. Once vessels exit through the La Perouse or Tsugaru straits into the North Pacific, persistent tracking depends on mobile assets rather than fixed infrastructure. Those assets are finite. The northern route that Chinese forces have been probing in exercises with Russia threads through waters where allied coverage is weakest.
China fears encirclement. In April it ordered companies and research institutions to find ways to protect the trade corridors it depends on. The Northern Sea Route, navigable by surface vessel for roughly five months a year, has become central to that thinking. It is largely free of the chokepoints that constrain Chinese trade elsewhere, save for the Bering Strait and ice. Control of the Russian Far East coast would give China an anchor for that route and remove the last layer of dependence on Russian goodwill to use it.
The Russian Far East holds the world’s largest concentration of coal-hosted rare-metal ore deposits. Germanium, critical to semiconductor manufacturing, is found there alongside rare earth elements used in smartphones, radar systems and electric vehicles. The region also holds Russia’s largest gold reserves and significant deposits of silver, titanium, molybdenum, tungsten, copper, tin and iron. China is already the dominant foreign investor in the area, under a bilateral cooperation framework that expired in 2024.
Xi Jinping has spoken of both the century of humiliation and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Hong Kong and Macau have been returned. Taiwan remains the unfinished business that draws Western attention. But the Russian Far East represents a different kind of opportunity – one that could arrive not through confrontation but through the slow transfer of leverage as Russia’s position deteriorates.
Beijing would not need to seize the territory as a first step, though sovereignty must ultimately be understood as the aim. Preferential access to Vladivostok, long-term lease arrangements, or a boundary revision negotiated from strength could each move the pieces into place. Russia, needing Chinese support to survive Western pressure, may have little room to refuse.
For Xi, the stakes are personal as well as strategic. No Chinese ruler since the Qing emperors has governed a China of this size. Recovering the Russian Far East would cement his place in history as the leader who presided over a greater, resurgent China, the world’s new power. That is not a footnote to his ambition. It may be the point of it.
The West has built its containment architecture around a set of geographic assumptions. Those assumptions should be revisited.