Late last year a curious video aired on Chinese television.

It showed a speck of concrete and steel, surrounded by frozen tundra, perched on the rocky coast of Inexpressible Island in the icy Ross Sea, deep inside Antarctica’s Southern Ocean.

The video zoomed in to reveal a state-of-the-art building that almost looked like an ice-bound resort, replete with ocean views and Scandi-style timber furniture. Outside, temperatures sat well below minus 40 degrees Celsius while insulated heating systems kept the chill at bay.

The building can accommodate around 80 residents, year round. One of them, Zhun He, noted how small the rooms are.

“This is our summer dormitory. Which is relatively compact,” he says dryly, in the online video.

As he speaks, the sound of patriotic music can be heard in the background. It is a giveaway that all is not as at first, it seems.

This is not a fancy Antarctic resort. This is Qinling Station. It is China’s fifth Antarctic base, and the third capable of operating 12 months a year.

China’s new ‘treasure house of resources’

Wang Wenbin, from the People’s Republic of China’s ministry of foreign affairs, told a press conference in February that China’s new station “will help … promote peace and sustainable development in Antarctica”.

Yet with permanent sea, air and land capabilities, enabling China to potentially monitor Australian and New Zealand communications using the BeiDou navigation network, Qinling Station appears to be more than that.

Not only is Qingling’s Antarctic location highly strategic — the frontier to Australia’s back door and right next door to a permanent US station, McMurdo – but a 2009 book-length study by the Polar Research Institute of China (PRIC) described the Antarctic as a “global treasure house of resources”.

China – which has rushed to invest in Antarctica since the 1980s in an effort to catch up with the West — is keenly aware of Antarctica’s importance, as not just an area rich with fish, but also energy.

Qinling Station has access to potentially hundreds of billions of tonnes of natural gas and oil that is believed to lie beneath Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. And it has capacity to become a cornerstone of what many argue is Beijing’s increasingly strategic plan to become the world’s premier polar power.

Antarctic waters also host hundreds of shipping sea lanes, according to 2018 research by the University of Cambridge, further underscoring why influence in Antarctica is so closely tied to projecting global power.

“There is an increasing number of research stations in Antarctica. On one hand that’s a positive development, because it shows an increasing interest in Antarctic science. And nations that want to be involved in Antarctic matters,” says Shirley Scott, a professor of international law and international relations at UNSW’s Australian Defence Force Academy.

On the other hand, Scott says, China has been transparent in stating that it does not want its activities restricted, particularly its resource related activities in the Antarctic region.

“It has, for example, not been keen on the development of new protected marine areas,” she says.

Australia is concerned

There is already evidence that China has been sending more than just scientists to Antarctica and Australia’s intelligence community is growing concerned.

A source inside the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) noted China’s Antarctic bases can serve as platforms for powerful satellites and radar systems.

Australian intelligence agencies are aware that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) personnel have previously participated in Beijing’s Antarctic program without their presence being reported.

This is a breach of the Antarctic Treaty, a groundbreaking legal agreement set up in 1959 that formalised the demilitarisation of the continent, splitting it into different zones and establishing the terms under which nations can operate in Antarctica.

The Antarctic Treaty was originally signed by 12 countries whose scientists had been active in the region in 1957 and 1958. It came into force in 1961 and now has 57 signatory nations, including China.

But is China operating in the spirit of the Treaty?

In 2008, six PLA personnel were sent to Zhongshan Station to build a high-frequency radar station.

These radar stations are powerful enough to block US satellites that pass over southern polar areas.

In 2013, China’s Antarctic expedition included a PLA satellite expert who installed new BeiDou-2 GPS systems that utilise advanced global positioning system technology.

Scott says that while the Antarctic Treaty system has been a robust mechanism guaranteeing peace, and Antarctica’s demilitarisation, since it was established, a rush on resources by any major country could undermine its purpose.

“Antarctica is currently governed by the Antarctic Treaty system but underpinning that system is an agreement to disagree regarding sovereignty claims on the continent,” she says.

China is not alone

However China is not the only country interested in the resources Antarctica has to offer.

“It would be unhelpful to think that it was only China interested in accessing those resources,” Scott says.

Global powers have long tussled over dominance in Antarctica.

Within a decade of the end of World War II, the United States and what was then the USSR were casting their eyes towards control of the Antarctic continent.

It was a goal that the British already knew would not be easy.

Shortly after this photo was taken, of British explorer Robert Scott’s 1912 expedition to the South Pole, everyone in it was dead.

Scott and his team were attempting to match Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen whose party of five became the first to reach the South Pole the previous year, on December 14, 1911.

The deaths of Scott and his team highlighted the dangers of Imperial competition in the name of science, and warned of a deadly side to the peaceful continent.

By 1945, a new era of competition between the USSR and its ideological enemy, the United States, had begun, according to historian Richard Overy in his book Blood and Ruins.

Declassified US documents dated to the mid-1950s are critical to understanding how the West,s approach to Antarctica changed.

As far back as 1957, the US considered Antarctica a potential future battleground. Simply titled ‘Operations plan for Antarctica’, this document revealed secret plans by the US to beef up permanent scientific bases on the icy continent.

The strategy was to ease access for the US and its allies to Antarctica’s natural resources and the bases were considered “essential in terms of the United States national interests”.

“Access by the United States with friendly powers to the natural resources of the Antarctic.” Permanent US scientific based were there “lest US rights in Antarctica be diminished by the year-round presence of other nations”. 

The US government invested heavily in the region. 

The CIA conducted extensive, detailed military geography studies that investigated oceanography, tides, water levels, coastal geography and even an investigation of human survival in Antarctic waters. The work was published in a 133-page CIA study.

It would seem the ground was set for a new phase of nation-state competition in Antarctica.

The 1959 Antarctic Treaty attempted to smooth all that by enshrining Antarctica could be used only for peaceful purposes, freedom of scientific investigation would be maintained and any scientific observations and results would be freely exchanged.

These articles have successfully prevented competition in the Antarctic from spilling into conflict, and have maintained peace on the Antarctic continent even at the height of the Cold War from 1945 to 1991.

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‘A free-for-all jungle’

Yet, global tensions have never left the frozen continent.

Since 2000 the US (and its allies) as well as China have emerged as the globe’s grand strategic competitors, with tensions in Taiwan and the South China Sea causing concern.

Dr Phillip Law, a former director of the Australian Antarctic Division, had warned since the 1970s that Antarctica could become a flashpoint.

Law argued that if countries don’t stick to the rules in Antarctica “it will be a free-for-all jungle”.

“The big boys with the biggest resources, and the most capital, will just go down there and go for their lives,” he said.

China’s Polar Research Institute (PRIC) as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were approached as part of this story. Neither responded to requests for comment.