A new report from one of Australia's leading defense think tanks argues that China may not need to force its way through the Western-designed security cordon in the Western Pacific — it may simply walk through a door left open by history and Russia's growing vulnerability.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) published an analysis on June 30 by strategic analyst Paula Allen contending that China could eventually gain unobstructed access to the Pacific Ocean by reasserting claims over territories ceded to Russia under 19th-century treaties. The report identifies Vladivostok — Russia's largest naval base on the Pacific — as the geographic linchpin of what Allen describes as an overlooked route around the First Island Chain.
ASPI Analyst Paula Allen Identifies A Northern Pacific Backdoor
The First Island Chain — an arc of islands running from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines — has long anchored Western strategy in the Indo-Pacific. The United States and Japan have built layered surveillance infrastructure across this cordon, making the waters near Taiwan and Japan a focal point of strategic competition. The underlying assumption has been that China would have to penetrate this chain to project meaningful naval power into the open Pacific.
Allen's report challenges that logic from the north. If China were to control the Pacific coastline stretching from north of the Korean Peninsula to the Sea of Okhotsk — including Vladivostok — the People's Liberation Army Navy could bypass existing chokepoints entirely, entering the Pacific without passing through any of the monitored southern straits.
The report stops short of calling this imminent, but warns that "this possibility is growing, and could materialize with almost no warning" as Russia's capacity weakens and its strategic dependence on Beijing deepens.
The 19th-Century Treaties Beijing Has Never Forgotten
The territorial claim is grounded in specific history. Under the Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and the Convention of Peking in 1860, a weakened Qing dynasty ceded more than 1 million square kilometers of Pacific coastal territory to the Russian Empire. The region extended from the northern edge of the Korean Peninsula to the southern rim of the Sea of Okhotsk — land that had been home to Tungusic peoples long before either power arrived.
The Soviet Union later pledged to return the territory but never followed through. A 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict and the 2001 Sino-Russian Friendship Treaty both failed to resolve the underlying claim. China, for its part, has never formally relinquished it.
The tension surfaced publicly in 2023, when China released official maps that labeled Vladivostok and nearby cities using their Chinese names, triggering sharp protests from Moscow. The New York Times, citing a leaked 2025 report from Russia's Federal Security Service, reported that the Kremlin is fully aware of the risk Beijing poses to these territories.
Beijing Waits For The Cost Of Recovery To Drop
The ASPI report frames Beijing's posture as one of patient strategic calculation. Allen argues that China has not abandoned its claims — it is simply "waiting for the cost of recovery to fall below the cost of conquest."
That waiting period may be shortening. Xi Jinping's frequent invocations of China's "Century of Humiliation" and his national rejuvenation agenda set the ideological context. With Hong Kong and Macao already returned to Chinese sovereignty and Taiwan still unresolved but commanding sustained Western attention, the Russian Far East represents a different kind of opportunity — one that, in the report's framing, could be realized "not through confrontation, but through the gradual transfer of influence as Russia's status declines."
Outright annexation need not be the first step. The report identifies priority port access at Vladivostok, a long-term lease arrangement, or a negotiated border revision as plausible opening moves. Russia, which relies on Chinese economic and diplomatic support to withstand Western pressure stemming from the Ukraine war, "may have little room to refuse."
The report also raises Xi's personal stake in the outcome. No Chinese leader since the Qing dynasty has governed as expansive a territory as China does today. Recovering the Russian Far East, Allen suggests, could cement Xi's legacy as the architect of a genuinely restored China — and this ambition "may not be a byproduct of his goals; it may be the very core of them."
The 'Fish Hook' System And Its Exploitable Northern Edge
The strategic implications extend well beyond the territorial question. The report details the "Fish Hook" surveillance network, a joint US-Japan system operating since 2005 that combines fixed underwater hydrophone arrays, maritime patrol aircraft, and ship-based sensors to monitor submarine and surface vessel activity across the East and South China Seas. Its critical southern chokepoints — the Miyako Strait, Osumi Strait, and Tsushima Strait — form the backbone of this surveillance architecture.
Russia's Pacific coastline sits above the northern boundary of this system. Chinese vessels transiting into the North Pacific via the La Pérouse Strait — the passage between Russia's Sakhalin Island and Japan's Hokkaido — or the Tsugaru Strait between Hokkaido and Honshu would be tracked by mobile assets rather than fixed hydrophone infrastructure. The report notes that Chinese naval forces have already been testing these northern routes during joint exercises with Russia, probing what it describes as the weakest waters in the allied defense perimeter.
Were China to secure Vladivostok and the surrounding coastline, the downstream consequences for Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea would be substantial. Defense perimeters, undersea communications cables, and commercial shipping lanes would all be exposed to new Chinese strategic pressure. China would also acquire maritime access to Arctic shipping routes and potential leverage over critical mineral deposits that underpin global technology supply chains.
The report closes on a note of institutional urgency: the West's containment architecture, Allen writes, "is built on a set of geographical assumptions — and those assumptions should be revisited." （Related： China Says Batanes 'Belong to China' — Experts Warn Its Gray Zone Has Turned Darker ｜ Latest ）
