Stories from the New Silk Road: The Bering Sea

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1:08Imagine having the Belt and Road Initiative include Alaska. One of the most strategic ports in the world. Amen. So we have a sense of urgency on this. They see the Arctic opening up, we see the Arctic opening up. It's not a secret. What we thought was Fortress America may not be Fortress America anymore. And the soft spot may be in the Arctic. Exactly.

1:37In the northern Pacific Ocean, the Bering Sea separates mainland Russia from Alaska in the United States, an important gateway to the Arctic. It's one of the richest and most volatile seas in the world, sitting precariously between two superpowers.

1:58And yet this has not prevented China from increasing its presence and role in the region while pursuing an ambitious Arctic policy connected to the Belt and Road Initiative and centered around developing a polar silk road. China's program to increase its influence and create new Arctic shipping and trade routes. It's in our best interest to know who's out there and what they're doing and why they're doing it. Think of it, of the police of the Bering Sea. A diplomatic row has erupted between the US and China after a balloon was spotted at high altitude in the skies over America. Through joint military exercises with Russia, fishing, shipping and scientific research, over recent years China has sought to explore new opportunities on the Bering Sea and flex its muscles, sometimes right on America's doorstep.

2:54And in 2024, we had the first Chinese Coast Guard patrol in the Arctic. Yeah, we're known for wilderness and fantastic mountains to look at, but we've got some pretty important intelligence and defense capabilities here that are strategic to the whole world. Boys, we've got power. Thank you. I'm BBC News correspondent Anna Holligan. We're going to do an interview from the pilot's sea in a C-130 Hercules. In stories from the new Silk Road, The Bering Sea, on the documentary from the BBC World Service, I'm heading with producer Pete Shevlin to Alaska, America's last frontier, where we'll explore how a remote and strategic corner of the US is evolving into the new front line of an economic and political battle between three of the world's most powerful nations.

3:48So you're going to hear a little jolt. It's going to feel and it's going to get loud. And things are going to light up. All right, come and do it sometime.

4:01Before I set off on my Alaskan adventure, I wanted to get in touch with a local journalist to gain some kind of understanding of what's been happening in the air and sea around America's largest state. Over the past decade, there have been increasing reports of Chinese research vessels or join Russian-Chinese military exercises in the region, sometimes within the 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone, or EEZ, where the U.S. holds certain rights. I'm surrounded by military installations here where we are in the eastern interior, and somebody's got a report on it. Tim Ellis is a senior reporter for KUAC News, a public radio station based in Fairbanks.

4:45I got a couple of inquiries just from members of the public. Hey, have you heard about flights in the international airspace just off Alaska? It's around every country. So in the past 15 years or so since you moved back, how many times have Chinese or Russian ships or planes been sighted near Alaska? I don't know how many. NORAD reports when they want to report maintaining operational security and such. A very important organization, North American Aerospace Defense Command. It is the U.S. and Canada. I was just counting the number of stories I've written. It looks like about a dozen or so over the years.

5:23But that's by no means the total sum of the number of times this occurs. I expect it's a lot more than a dozen. You know, the whole Indo-Pacific, especially with the rise of China, Maybe it's the next great, how do you say, the great game with the great powers, just maneuvering and keeping an eye on each other. Do you think it's true to say that Alaska is becoming a new front line in a political and economic battle involving those three superpowers? Yes, I do. Just from what I observe, the little army post that my parents used to work in, I worked a year there too, somewhere higher. It was, you know, a sleepy little place where they would store tanks and they would conduct training exercises and some of the huge training ranges around there.

6:06And now it's way built up. Throw in one last mention. You remember that crazy balloon that came floating over from China? Well, it floated right over Alaska, of course, just to kind of take a look around, I assume at everything like the military installations in the area in which we live here.

6:31Okay, so on the sign, it says, attention anglers, be aware of bears. Do not forfeit fish to bears. This teaches bears that anglers provide an easy meal. Stop fishing. Immediately transport captured fish to a secure location such as your vehicle. So the message here is on the Russian River, watch out for bears.

7:04We're on Kodiak Island, sitting on the edge of a pontoon in a glistening aquamarine bay, looking out towards the North Pacific. Kodiak lies 30 miles off Alaska's southern coastline. It's known for its mountainous and lush green landscape. The island is also home to Alaska's biggest fishing port and a US Coast Guard base, which is where we're heading now.

7:3430 minutes is pretty quick. We could be responding to something that's 1 ,500 kilometres away. Thank you. Have you ever wondered what it's like to fly in a massive C-130 Hercules military aircraft? No? Me neither. Until I met Coast Guard Pilot Lieutenant Commander John Resch at base Kodiak. Okay, sure. We're going to do an interview from the pilot's seat in a C-130 Hercules. This is quite unique. There's really nothing you can mess up. Just don't flick any buttons. Don't kick anything. So this is the pilot seat. That's right what you're sitting in there. We call it the right seat. That's the co-pilot seat.

8:20So do me a favor. You see that master caution that's flashing? Don't press it. Push it. Yep. Alive and ready. There's the third screen. So you're going to hear a little jolt. It's going to feel, and it's going to get loud, and things are going to light up. All right. Coming to external power.

8:41So now everything's going to start coming alive. Say we're out there and we see something transiting that's, you know, foreign flag vessel. Yeah, we're going to watch it. We're going to make sure that they are doing what they're supposed to be doing. Think of the police of the Bering Sea. Yes, we have seen Chinese vessels. Yes, we have seen Russian vessels in our EEZ operating in and out. Everything that I have personally seen has been conducted within the realms of international law. But what would allow them to enter the U.S. territorial waters there? So the U.S. territorial waters, if we're talking about two different things here, we have what's called the exclusive economic zone.

9:22But that doesn't mean that we own that water. It's not like it's our property and their trust passing by coming into that. We own the rights to fish in it. We own the rights to minerals and oils. If you've got a point of land, draw 200 miles around that land, and that's our exclusive economic zone. That gives us the rights to mineral, to marine resources within that zone. Every country has that. Every maritime boundary country has their exclusive economic zone. We just happen to have the biggest one. A lot of that's because we bought Alaska. Believe it or not, that's true. In 1867, following Russia's loss in the Crimean War, they actually sold Alaska to the US for$7.2 million.

10:08At the time, critics suggested America had bought useless, inhospitable land, and it was referred to as Seward's Folly after the Secretary of State who championed the idea. Yet today, with its abundance of natural resources and a hugely strategic location, few question the value of America's most northerly state. We just happen to share that boundary in Alaska with our Russian neighbors. We don't own the right to not allow people on it. We're not guarding that, but we are monitoring that. So Japanese fishermen or Chinese fishermen or anybody else is fishing within our zone, then yeah, we have the right to stop them from doing that.

10:52We can enforce that upon our exclusive economic zone. What does that enforcement look like? So my job then would be to go out and find it. So if we're out there and we are on a patrol and we're picking up a boat and we can say, hey, this is not an American flag boat. They do not have the rights to be fishing here or they do not have the rights to be drilling for oil if they can figure out a way to get out there and quickly drill for oil. Our job is to ID that. Our job is to find that, and then our job is to get somebody out there, whether that's a boat or some other kind of law enforcement entity that's working, to get them out there and conduct the boarding.

11:28When you're talking about the exclusive economic zone and what the air station does for that, that's our portion of it.

11:44The language barrier is a real thing. What we would perceive as possibly aggressive might just be tone inflection. So we can perceive that as aggression, whereas what their perspective is, is that that's just how they talk. We speak English. They speak something else. So do you have to familiarize yourself with Russian and Chinese dialects? I don't. No. And we don't fly with interpreters. We have certain things that we will say and then certain things that we expect in response to what we say. For example, can you say? Not supposed to. Right? No. Okay. That's why I have Chief here. She's here to keep me honest just in case.

12:27But so it's something that basically neutralizes any potentially – any situation that could ignite if you don't have that shared language. Yeah. Right? Yeah, you don't want to, like, when we're out there, what I'll say is this, everything I've seen has been well within the realms of what you would expect them to say.

12:52This is another version of a map that we commissioned when we opened the border with Russia in 1988. Shows Noam reaching out to Providenia, Alaska reaching out to Chukotka. My name is Meade Treadwell. I'm a former lieutenant governor of Alaska, former chair of the Arctic Research Commission. The irony of what's happening right now is we're trading with China. We're very much a part of the supply chain of Chinese goods. We're very much a part of marine safety with Russia. We have neighborly relations on the one hand and preparing for conflict on the other. This is Dan DeRue, and it's a picture of the Norgay airship coming over in 1926.

13:37And you've got five Alaska natives in their cusp bucks out, probably hunting walrus, and looking up at this airship in the sky and probably saying, Inupik, what in the heck is that? But Dan is a fun artist. Take a look at what's happened. All right. Russia attacks Ukraine. The West comes together and says, let's try to isolate Russia economically. So China ends up buying lots of oil and natural gas that Russia can't sell to anybody else. We've seen it with fish. We have barred Russian fish from coming in. And yet Pollock, very much a part of our fish and chips. The Russians were playing very heavily in that market in the United States.

14:21Now they're not. So they've been flooding our markets in Asia, and we've been losing some of our markets in Asia. In some ways, the Chinese-Russian relationship is an economic one, where the very large Chinese market is helping to fund Russia's activity in the war. I think we're very concerned about that. I think we all should be very concerned about that. The No Limits partnership between China and Russia was highlighted by Admiral Samuel Paparo, the U.S. military's commander of the Indo-Pacific region, when the Senate held an armed services committee in April 2025. It's a transactional symbiosis where each state fulfills the other state's weakness to mutual benefit of each state.

15:05China has provided 70 % of the machine tools and 90 % of the legacy chips that's enabled Russia to rebuild its war machine. And then coming back to China is potentially submarine quieting help, as well as other help in some of the areas where Russia is strong. Why is it that we're seeing an increase in Russian and Chinese military drills in this region? I think because there's several new kinds of technologies that if, God forbid, we were to get into a conflict with Russia and China. We have very strategic assets in the north that anybody in defense doctrine would say, let's take it out.

15:56If you go out to Shamya, we have one of the ballistic missile warning radars that tell us, in fact, it was at Shamya where we predicted and confirmed the launch of Sputnik. But we've been following Russian launch operations there for decades. We have a giant radar near clear, halfway between Anchorage and Fairbanks, a little closer to Fairbanks. That is the BMUs, the ballistic missile warning system as well. What has been new lately is that the Russians and Chinese have done a couple of live fire exercises in the Bering Sea where we have a large number of fishing boats. and the Russians, you know, again, have the right to do military tests in international waters, but they both happen to be within our 200-mile limit where we've worked with the Russians on safety and everything else, and they just announced, well, we're coming in, boom, fishermen, you better get out of the way.

16:47And that's caused a lot of consternation around here, especially two years ago or so.

16:57Why is China joining live fire exercises off Alaska? Probably because the U.S., Japan, Korea, and Philippines may be doing exercises near China and Taiwan. Lieutenant Commander John Resch. When I was on Qatar, I went to Japan. I did patrols in Japanese water. So if you're asking my opinion on that, we go to different places as a Coast Guard. So when you say the Coast Guard, the United States Coast Guard doesn't just stay in the United States. We travel all over the place. It'd be pretty hard to say, you know, we're the United States. You know, we get to do United States things. But if other countries do their country's things, that's bad on them.

17:30So they're operating, I would say, similarly to how we operate. They have global interests just like we have global interests. They want to see their country thrive just like we want to see our country thrive. Do you mind hitting that for me quick? When you fly, it's mentally exhausting. It doesn't matter how long you fly for it. So when you have world powers doing world power things, it's hard to say from my perspective, what are you doing? That's a hard thing to say is why are you doing this? That's bad. They have global interests. We have global interests. They see the Arctic opening up. We see the Arctic opening up.

18:06It's not a secret that there's money to be had there, and if that's going to best interest their international policy, if that's going to be what they perceive as the best interest for them. Yeah, they're going to do it. And same thing with us. If we perceive that this is within the best interest of the United States, that's where we want to be, too.

18:30The first recorded encounter with China's military on the Bering Sea was in 2015. Since then, there have been at least seven reported sightings, in particular joint drills with the Russian Navy or Air Force. Then, over the past three years, Chinese research vessels have been regularly spotted operating near Alaskan waters, including five last summer. Over a number of months, we attempted to interview a representative of the Chinese government to ask why China is increasing its presence and conducting military exercises on the Bering Sea. Unfortunately, they refused, but we were sent an English translation of their Arctic policy, published in 2018, in order to better understand their perspective.

19:18The White Paper describes China as a near-Arctic state that aims to understand, protect, develop and participate in the governance of the Arctic. It also outlines their plan to develop a polar silk road, which would see new Arctic shipping lanes connect to the wider Belt and Road Initiative, providing alternative routes for international trade. I quote, China, as a responsible major country, is ready to cooperate with all relevant parties to seize the historic opportunity in the development of the Arctic.

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21:39This is the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Anna Holligan, and this is stories from the new Silk Road, the Bering Sea, from the BBC World Service. All right, we just reached all the way to Anchorage, Alaska on that radio. Back at base Kodiak, I was invited aboard one of the latest additions to the Coast Guard fleet, a cutter called John Witherspoon, named in honor of the first African-American to command both a medium endurance cutter and a Coast Guard shore unit. My name is Caitlin Lane. I'm the executive officer on board. So we are up on the bridge or the pilot house of the vessel.

22:20This is where most of the action happens. We can start every single system from up here on that computer there. This cutter is actually not even a year in the Coast Guard. We commissioned it on May, not May, April, sir? Commissioning was April 7th? April 3rd, I said. April 3rd, excuse me, was the commissioning date. Thursday, April 3rd. Brand new ship to the Coast Guard. We have only made one trip out to the Bering and it was a short one. We were out there for search and rescue as the asset out there, as well as doing a fisheries patrol. It's sexy beast. Where's the peat float? Is that right where you're sitting, that alleyway?

23:01Now the following will be a test of the ship's alarms and whistle. All hands, disregard, disregard, general, followed by chemical. When the Coast Guard Arctic District respond to an incident on the Bering Sea, it's often far away from Kodiak or anywhere else in Alaska. But there are both fishing fleets and scattered communities on the Aleutian chain who find themselves much closer to the action. The Aleut Corporation is a non-profit group formed by native Alaskans who own, protect and manage the islands from their Anchorage head office. Skowy Vergan is their president and CEO. Aleut is actually the word given to our people by the Russians.