Article

On 6 December 1981, the Norwegian icebreakerPolar Circle quietly left Goa, India, carrying the 21 scientific and military members of Indiaʼs first Antarctic expedition, Gangotri 1. The Indian government, not yet part of the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), kept the expedition covert. Members were instructed not to reveal their destination to anyone except their immediate families, and there was no official farewell. They sailed south via Mauritius and sighted Antarctica on 2 January 1982. By then, the Indian government had informed ATS members about the journey, and a diplomatic storm was swirling. India, a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), declared the expedition a triumph for the Third WorldFootnote ¹ (Agnihotri, Reference Agnihotri2002). The British science magazine, New Scientist, captured the restrained fury of Western nations at Indiaʼs perceived impudence with one headline: “Indians quietly invade Antarctica” (Agarwal, Reference Agarwal1982).

While Indian politicians managed the diplomatic fallout, the expedition got to work. They established an uncrewed weather station, mapped Queen Maud Landʼs coastline and discovered an uncharted oceanic mountain off its coast. They named the mountain “Indira” to honour their most prominent supporter, the Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. Supply issues shortened the expedition, but with Gandhiʼs backing, they returned the following year. By Indiaʼs third expedition in 1983, it had joined the ATS and that year established Indiaʼs first permanent Antarctic station, Dakshin Gangotri. Ice disabled Dakshin Gangotri six years later, and they replaced it with a new station, Maitri, which they built further inland. They maintained this single base until the 2010s, when they began to expand their activities. In 2012, they built the controversial Bharati Station in the Larsemann Hills (OʼReilly, Reference OʼReilly2011). In 2023, they announced an India–Russia collaboration to build multiple icebreakers (Linganna, Reference Linganna2023), and in 2024, planned to replace Maitri with a larger Maitri II (Jayaram, Reference Jayaram, Scott, Stephens and McGee2024) (see Map 1).

Map 1

Chinese and Indian Research Stations in Antarctica. Chinese stations are marked in red. Indian stations are marked in brown. Map adapted from ATS base map by the authors.

Three years after Gangotri 1, on 20 November 1984, Chinaʼs first Antarctic expedition departed from Shanghai. The Chinese government, which had joined the ATS before finalising the expedition, dispatched 591 personnel, most of whom were construction workers, and held an elaborate ceremony to send them off. The expedition travelled aboard two government-owned ships, the J121 icebreaker and Xiang Yang Hong 10. Its mission was to build a permanent, year-round station, Changcheng (Great Wall), on the Antarctic Peninsula (see Map 1), but as Xiang Yang Hong 10 was not an icebreaker and needed to leave the polar region before winter ice trapped it, they had only one summer to complete the station. After working fourteen to sixteen-hour days, they finished it on 20 February (Chen et al., Reference Chen, Liu, Bian, Chen, Huang, Hu and Luo2017). Four years later, in 1989, the Chinese Antarctic Programme built a second station, Zhongshan, near Indiaʼs Bharati base. Like India, they maintained but did not expand their programme in the 1990s. They built their next summer base, Kunlun, in 2009, inland from Zhongshan, and have expanded exponentially since then with another base, Taishan (2014), then Qinling (2024), a year-round base in Eastern Antarctica and – in 2025 announced that they are building a sixth summer base in Marie Byrd Land (Gibson, Reference Gibson2025) (see Map 1). Chinaʼs polar programmes also operate four icebreakers, are finishing a fifth and are developing new-generation Polar Class Two ships capable of year-round operation (Eiterjord, Reference Eiterjord2025).

Although some Southern Hemisphere, Global South countries – South Africa and several South American nations – have Antarctic bases, India and China are the only Global South, Northern Hemisphere nations with permanent bases in the Antarctic. Most previous studies of the Indian and Chinese Antarctic programmes have focused on instances where they disrupted the polar regionʼs geopolitical order: Indiaʼs 1950s destabilisation of the ATS status quo (Chaturvedi, Reference Chaturvedi2013; Dey, Reference Dey1991; Joyner, Reference Joyner1990; Howkins, Reference Howkins2008), and their controversial 2014 decision to establish a new base in a planned Antarctic Specially Managed Area (ASMA) (OʼReilly, Reference OʼReilly2011), as well as Chinaʼs growing influence in the twenty-first century (see, e.g. Andersson, Reference Andersson2021; Bergin & Press, Reference Bergin and Press2020; Brady, Reference Brady2017; Buchanan, Reference Buchanan2024; Jiang, Reference Jiang2022). This article takes a different approach in multiple ways.

Its first departure from these other studies is the sources it examines. These include English, Chinese and Hindi language government statements, media reports, opinion pieces, partisan scholarship and memoirs focused on the Antarctic. Drawing on insights from these materials, the article offers a comparative analysis of the two countriesʼ Antarctic engagements, tracing their parallel trajectories over time rather than focusing solely on moments of friction with Western interests. This extended analysis demonstrates how underlying cultural geographies have shaped Chinaʼs and Indiaʼs programmes, and how their spatial imaginaries differ from those shaping the continentʼs Anglosphere, African and Latin American programmes (see, eg. Antonello, Reference Antonello2019; Howkins & Lorenzo, Reference Howkins and Lorenzo2019; Lavery, Reference Lavery2019; Roberts, et al., Reference Roberts, Howkins, van der Watt, Peder, van der Watt and Howkins2016).

The articleʼs comparative, long-term, cultural analysis of multilingual sources reveals a recurring theme: Chinese and Indian ambivalence towards Antarcticaʼs Western-dominated governance systems. This ambivalence persisted over decades as the two countriesʼ discourses evolved through four distinct phases: Third World self-representation (1950s–1960s), balancing resource access and environmental protection (1970s–1990s), scientific progress (1980s–2000s) and geopolitical reimaginings (2010s–2020s).

The two countriesʼ antagonism towards the Antarctic governance system took shape in the 1950s, as each sought to assert its leadership among non-aligned “Third World” countries. India pursued this criticism through the 1960s, while the Chinese state focused on perpetual revolution. In the 1970s, China re-entered global debates, and both countries joined NAM calls for the ATS to reclassify Antarctica as a global commons, granting Global South countries access to its resources. Although both acquiesced to the ATS in the 1980s, their subsequent economic growth has only intensified their need for polar resources, and their growing global influence has enabled them to articulate this need more forcefully. In 2024, for example, India hosted the 46^th Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting in Kochi under the banner Vasudhaiva Kuumbakam (“the world is one family”), invoking a shared inheritance (Kakodkar, Reference Kakodkar2024). In 2017 at the United Nations (UN) in Geneva, Chinaʼs President Xi Jinping was more direct, outlining Chinaʼs plans to explore “strategic new frontiers” (zhanlue xin jiangyu) – the deep sea, outer space, cyberspace and the poles – which he insisted were “humanityʼs common heritage” (renlei mingyun gongtongyi) (Tsang & Cheung, Reference Tsang and Cheung2023).

The other side of their ambivalence is their stated and enacted willingness to operate within the ATS and the wider Western-led global political and economic system, despite their colonial histories. This has produced a paradox in which Chinese and Indian representations of Antarctica in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – portraying it as a new frontier for heroic exploration, resource extraction and geopolitical power – uncannily echo the imperialist narratives European powers used to describe their exploits in Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Although they have both expressed frustration that their status as “latecomers” has limited their influence in Antarctic governance, their diplomats and administrators have helped shape Antarcticaʼs governance frameworks (He, Reference He2016; Jayaram, Reference Jayaram, Scott, Stephens and McGee2024). Their Antarctic programmes have enabled their scientists to pursue scientific breakthroughs and their engineers to develop dual-use technologies with strategic significance, including independent satellite navigation systems. China has already used its Antarctic bases to establish the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, which can operate independently of the United States (US) military-owned Global Positioning System (GPS) (Buchta et al., Reference Buchta, Scheinert, King, Wilson, Koulali, Clarke, Gómez, Kendrick, Knöfel and Busch2025). India only operates a regional satellite navigation system but plans to extend it by establishing an Antarctic base (Kasat & Hari Krishna, Reference Kasat and Hari Krishna2022).

These technological achievements carry particular significance for two nations seeking to challenge a persistent colonial slur, formulated and even legislated in the nineteenth century, which insisted that they were technologically backwards and, therefore, “uncivilised” (Stroikos, 2020). Yet again, they are not seeking to dismantle this colonial paradigmʼs enduring hierarchy of knowledge and scientific achievement, but to improve their own positions within it. Along with the evidence of their impulse to extract from Antarctica, their pursuit of heroic (scientific) discoveries supports Roberts and Mancillaʼs (Reference Roberts, Mancilla, Roberts and Mancilla2024) argument that enduring colonial logics underpin the Antarctic system. We argue that this logic has also ensnared the globeʼs two largest self-identifying anticolonial states.

We also show that, since the 2010s, the Antarctic programmes of these two states have been integrated into developmentalist frameworks that move beyond postcolonial redress, serving instead as platforms for parallel worldmaking projects. These projects have extended the ideas of China and India temporally and geographically, constructing unified civilisational narratives with longer-than-colonial histories and extended geopolitical spheres. The Indian concept of Akhand Bharat (Greater India), like much of its foreign policy, is regional, focusing on the Indian Ocean zone while Chinaʼs conception of tianxia (“all under heaven”) reflects its globalism. This article explores Antarcticaʼs role in these frameworks, arguing that polar programmes function like civilisational positioning systems – analogous to GPS – reorienting cultural and geopolitical perceptions. This cultural positioning works in two directions: extending national maps southward and asserting symbolic claims on the continent through naming, policy, media and personal narratives. This shift from historical reckoning to worldmaking has not erased but enhanced the ambiguity in Chinese and Indian discourses on Antarctica. Neither country has backed away from its assertions that Global North-led institutions like the ATS need to become more inclusive, but they do not agree on how this should be done. As the article highlights, India has adopted a more conciliatory and multipolar stance in both its foreign policy and its collaboration with other countries in the Antarctic, in contrast to Chinaʼs assertive efforts to position itself as a great power.

The other conceptual argument this article makes is to connect this ambiguity towards Antarctica with the multidirectional essentialisation that proliferates in both Chinese and Indian worldmaking and discourse on Antarctica. We understand this essentialist discursive tendency to be conceptually linked to Antonelloʼs (Reference Antonello, Peder, van der Watt and Howkins2016) observation that Antarctica is often presented as a singular entity, rather than a complex network of places. Just as Antarctica is often presented as a singular continent or a generalised global commons, it also represents a space in which Indian and Chinese nationalists can essentialise theirs and other nations, and in which their countries, in turn, continue to be essentialised as “threats” in other conversations.

Representing the Third World (1950–1970)

Comprehending Chinaʼs and Indiaʼs approaches to Antarctica begins with recognising how colonial legacies and historical memories have shaped their environments, societies, cultures, and politics. Colonisation, perpetuated primarily by the British in India and various European states and the Japanese in China, brought many humiliations. One of the most enduring of these was the transfer of wealth to the colonists. As multiple Chinese and Indian commentators on the Antarctic have noted (Wang, Reference Wang2024; He, Reference He2016; Jayaram, Reference Jayaram, Scott, Stephens and McGee2024), this wealth transfer directly funded polar exploration and enabled European and Japanese explorers, sealers, and whalers to begin exploiting this remote terra nullius (“nobodyʼs land”). And, as the colonies were part of a newly globalised imperial trading system, goods that the whalers and sealers extracted from the Antarctic were sold in Shanghai and Madras (Basberg & Headland, Reference Basberg and Headland2008).

Alongside wealth extraction, colonists imposed an international order that debilitated Indians, Chinese, and other colonised peoples. This order exported European ideas of “nation” and “race,” and imposed a global hierarchy of peoples based on the perceived “natural” hierarchies within them. Industrial technology became a key marker of progress, and nineteenth-century laws classified nations as “civilised,” “barbarian,” or “savage” depending on the visibility of their industrial technology. Through “techno-scientific orientalism,” Europeans promoted the idea of science as a universal civilising force, suggesting that non-Europeans could attain modernity by developing of science-based technology but strictly controlled access to scienceʼs elite, European core (Stroikos, Reference Stroikos2020).

The structures of techno-scientific orientalism were evident during the First International Polar Year (IPY, 1882-83), when a European and US scientific consortium invited colonised nations to aid but not participate in their global pursuit of polar knowledge (Tammiksaar, Sukhova & Lüdecke, Reference Tammiksaar, Sukhova, Lüdecke, Barr and Luedecke2010). The Qing and Japanese imperial courts made minor monetary contributions; Western scientists coordinated geomagnetic research from within China at Sheshan (Tang, Reference Tang2022). This first IPY not only displayed the established global techno-civilisation hierarchies but also how much those excluded sought entry to its core. The newly established Indian Congress urged explorers worldwide to undertake Antarctic expeditions (Yao, Reference Yao2021), and the Japanese explorer Shirase Nobu (1861–1946) was inspired to join the race to the South Pole. Appealing to the Japanese parliament for funds to join the race between Norwegian Roald Amundsen and British Robert Scott, Nobu said, “The powers of the world ridicule the Empire of Japan, saying we Japanese are barbarians who are strong and brave in warfare, but timid and cowardly when it comes to the realm of science” (quoted in Stevenson, Reference Stevenson2011, 160).

Though the parliament denied him funding, he raised support independently and set off for Antarctica. Unfortunately, he was delayed in Australia for a year, and did not reach the Antarctic until the race for the South Pole was over, but he and his team did travel to and carry out scientific experiments on Antarctica (Stevenson, Reference Stevenson2011). Along with their post-World War I humiliation in the Treaty of Versailles (Stevenson, Reference Stevenson2011), this hesitation to expand their Empire into Antarctica represents another example of Japanʼs difficulty entering the European techno-nationalist core in the early twentieth century.

As Chinese scholars repeatedly mention in their histories of the Antarctic (Wang & Wang, Reference Wang and Wang2021; Wang, Reference Wang2024; He, Reference He2016), European countries had no such qualms. Britain, France, and Norway relied on the “principle of effective occupation” from the Scramble for Africa to justify their claims on the southern continent (Howkins, Reference Howkins2017; Wang & Wang, Reference Wang and Wang2021). Chile and Argentina cited Papal rulings legitimising Spanish and Portuguese colonisation, and the British relied on their imperial realms in the Southern Atlantic to counter the South Americansʼ claims (Turchetti et al., Reference Turchetti, Naylor, Dean and Siegert2008; Howkins, Reference Howkins2016; Dodds & Collis, Reference Dodds, Collis, Dodds, Hemmings and Roberts2017). By 1942, these nations, along with Australia and New Zealand, had delineated around eighty per cent of Antarctica, bolstering their claims by supporting year-round “colonising” research and whaling stations (Roberts & Mancilla, Reference Roberts, Mancilla, Roberts and Mancilla2024; Dodds & Collis, Reference Dodds, Collis, Dodds, Hemmings and Roberts2017). After these nations had mapped and claimed the Antarctic, they turned their attention towards its scientific investigation. The Second IPY (1932–33) aimed to expand Antarctic research, focusing on meteorology and the jet streamʼs global impact. However, the Great Depression and the threat of war hindered their expeditions. Research within the Antarctic Circle was limited, and the data collected was not processed until after World War II (Laursen, Reference Laursen1949).

By then, global geopolitics had been profoundly reshaped. Former allies, the US and the Soviet Union, led opposing Cold War blocs but managed to collaborate to encourage a global wave of decolonisation. India and China were among its first beneficiaries. After decades of Indian protests against British rule, Britain gradually withdrew from India, beginning in the early 1940s, allowing it UN membership in 1942, and independence in 1947, under the leadership of Indira Gandhiʼs father, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964). Three years later, in January 1950, partitioned and devastated, it became a republic. Chinaʼs post-war transformation was equally traumatic. The civil war between the Republic of China (RoC) and the Communist Party resumed after World War II, ending with Mao Zedongʼs founding of the Peopleʼs Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949. Despite the RoCʼs defeat and exile in Taiwan, the US held the UN “China seat” for the RoC, including a position on the Security Council. Nehru refused Indiaʼs seat on the Security Council in solidarity with the PRC (Roy, Reference Roy2018).

Despite intense post-colonial challenges, both the PRC and the Indian Republic pursued leadership in global politics. The PRC joined the Soviet bloc, but Mao also sent his deputy Zhou Enlai (1989–1976) to the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, which launched the NAM. NAM nations, which called themselves “the Third World,” were unaffiliated with either Cold War bloc. Chinaʼs relationship with NAM was complicated by its alliance with the Soviets, but Nehru became their unofficial leader, shaping Indiaʼs foreign policy around NAMʼs principles (Chaturvedi, Reference Chaturvedi2013).

While both nations promoted post-colonial solidarity, they also claimed the vast territories they inherited from their colonial predecessors and aggressively territorialised the lands of minoritised nations within their borders. In 1962, their overlapping territorial claims in the Himalaya led to war, finally severing their tenuous NAM solidarity (Guyot-Réchard, Reference Guyot-Réchard2016). These dual legacies—colonial subjugation and imperial expanse—positioned them as the two most influential nation-states in the Third World, two of only a few nations able to challenge Western and, to a lesser extent, Soviet hegemony.

While the Indian and Chinese people founded new states, Cold War geopolitics reshaped Antarctica. This process started in 1946, when the Soviet Union claimed Antarctic rights based on a Russian imperial General, Fabian von Bellingshausenʼs 1820 sighting of the continent (Dodds, Reference Dodds2018). Five years later, in 1951, Australia and New Zealand demanded Japan renounce future claims to Antarctica in its Peace Treaty with the Allies, and Antarctic claimants began using permanent research bases like frontier outposts to strengthen their territorial claims. “Substantial scientific activity,” which required technological and economic strength, became the most widely accepted reason for an Antarctic presence (Dodds & Collis, Reference Dodds, Collis, Dodds, Hemmings and Roberts2017). The British used it to support their territorial claims against Chile and Argentina in the South Atlantic, suggesting their scientific approach to Antarctic governance was superior to the South Americans (Howkins, Reference Howkins2017). Speaking for many NAM countries, India voiced concerns that these geopolitics reflected Western imperial values and would make Antarctica a Cold War zone (van der Watt & Swart, Reference van der Watt, Swart, Roberts, van der Watt and Howkins2016; Yao, Reference Yao2021). In 1956, its permanent representative at the UN, Arthur Lall (1911–1998), proposed a debate about Antarctica in the UN General Assembly, citing fears of nuclear testing and Antarcticaʼs “considerable strategic, climatic and geophysical significance” (quoted in Chaturvedi Reference Chaturvedi2013, 305).

Rather than permitting the debate, Western and Soviet powers launched the third IPY, renamed the Geophysical Year (1957–58), with Antarctica as its focus. Australia, the US, France, Belgium, and Japan established new Antarctic bases, and apartheid South Africa built a sub-Antarctic base (van der Watt & Swart, Reference van der Watt, Swart, Roberts, van der Watt and Howkins2016). India made a modest contribution to several scientific projects, but its activities did not extend to Antarctica (Dey, Reference Dey1991). The US blocked the PRCʼs proposal to send a team, instead favouring RoC participation. PRC activities were limited to collecting domestic comparative data, echoing the Qingʼs contribution to the first IPY (Wang & Zhang, Reference Wang, Zhang, Launius, Fleming and DeVorkin2010; Tang, Reference Tang2022). Following this research, the Antarctic powers formed the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, which became the “primary knowledge broker” for Antarctic activities (Chown et al., Reference Chown, Bastmeijer, Brooks, Gilbert, Phillips and Shibata2024).

India tried to revive the Antarctic debate at the UN in 1957, but claimant countries Chile and Argentina—aligned with the US—blocked it and distanced themselves from NAM. Indian officials altered their petition, allowing Antarctic claims to stand so they could gain Chile and Argentinaʼs potential support, but this did not work (Chaturvedi, Reference Chaturvedi2011; Dodds & Collis, Reference Dodds, Collis, Dodds, Hemmings and Roberts2017). Instead, the US invited Chile, Argentina, the Soviet Union, and nine other countries it considered to have scientific interest in Antarctica (Australia, Belgium, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, apartheid South Africa, and the United Kingdom, see Table 1) to negotiate the ATS in Washington (Howkins, Reference Howkins2008; Chaturvedi, Reference Chaturvedi2013). The Soviets requested Indiaʼs inclusion, but the Americans refused (Yao, Reference Yao2021).

Table 1.

List of Parties to the Antarctic Treaty System. (Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty 2024 and United Nations 2022).

The Antarctic Treaty demarcates Antarctica and regulates polar activities. It “freezes” territorial claims—though the US and Soviet Union reserve future rights to make them—and forbids militarisation. It encloses Antarctica as a “zone of peace and science,” where only “rational use” of both biotic and abiotic resources is allowed (Haward & Cooper, Reference Haward and Cooper2014). As Joanne Yao (Reference Yao2021, 996) states, the ATS is “often celebrated as a model of international cooperation through scientific research” but has also been widely criticised for using “science as a hierarchical tool of exclusion.” Echoing nineteenth-century imperialist hierarchies, it creates a core group of elite “consultative” countries with the economic and logistical means to perform science in its restricted zone. Its requirement of a “substantial contribution” to Antarctic science—understood as a permanent base—to join this group has proved too high a barrier for most Global South countries. Moreover, as He Liu (Reference Liu2016) points out, the logic underpinning this governance structure is deeply flawed. Only allowing nation-states to become consulting countries by building bases encourages all of them to build a base, which is both logistically untenable and environmentally devastating. The ATS founders clearly never intended to make access to the continent as open as their treaty claimed. In practice, ATS members continued to use science to undermine ex-coloniesʼ Antarctic interests. For instance, when India warned that nuclear testing in Antarctica might affect the weather, the British dismissed the claim as “scientific rubbish,” telling India to “send scientists instead of making trouble” (Howkins, Reference Howkins2008, 39).

Neither China, India, nor any other NAM country had the means to establish an Antarctic base in the 1960s. Having lived through colonialism, they were preoccupied, as He (Reference He2016) explains, “achieving independence and feeding their people.” China followed a revolutionary, state-planned development model that resulted in the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). India adopted a planned economy, building large state-owned industries and pursuing the Green Revolution to increase food production. Despite these turbulent times, both nations remained committed to “modernisation” and continued to equate scientific achievement with national strength. They were also determined to “catch up” to their former colonisers (Stroikos, Reference Stroikos2020).

Global Commons and Planetary Ecologies (1970s–1980s)

Despite or perhaps because of these challenges, both countries continued to advocate for the Third World in international negotiations related to Antarctica. In the 1970s, India led a consortium of NAM nations demanding that the new Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) cover the Antarctic. After assuming the “China seat” at the UN in 1971, China joined these discussions (Westad & Chen, Reference Westad and Chen2024). Led by China and India, the Global South countries negotiating UNCLOS aimed to designate the deep seabed and high seas as a “common inheritance of humanity” (Yao, Reference Yao2021; Liu, Reference Liu2020; Wang, Reference Wang2024). These negotiations coincided with a broader Global South push to access Antarctic resources, including advocacy for the UNʼs Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which had begun exploring Southern Ocean biological resources. At the 1976 FAO conference, Guinea challenged ATS consultative states, asking why the Southern Oceanʼs resources were not considered a global commons (Wang & Wang, Reference Wang and Wang2021; Everson, Reference Everson1978). Subsequently, India and China both adopted this idea of the Antarctic as a “global commons.”

Ultimately, neither UNCLOS nor the FAO succeeded in dismantling the ATS. The ATS changed its protocols and focus, but many Global South commentators remained sceptical of its intentions. Wang (Reference Wang2024) describes the ATS reforms as them “pretending Antarctica was a global commons (quanqiu gong yu) but treating it as a terra nullius.” Nonetheless, the dual challenges embedded the idea of a “global commons” in international discourse and transformed NAM-nationsʼ attitudes towards international trade. It was also the first time independent India and China showed a concerted interest in accessing offshore resources.

Although Chinese and Indian economies pursued remarkably different paths to the late 1970s, their historical economies shared characteristics. Tasked with feeding the worldʼs two most populous countries, their governments relied on planned economies. Chinaʼs planned economy had been far more restrictive than Indiaʼs licensing system, but the Chinese state was opening its economy earlier than India. India would only finish dismantling its restrictive system in the 1990s at the directive of the World Bank. Both post-colonial economies had also sustained the imperial periphery-core extraction model, drawing resources from their territorial edges to support their populations and political centres. Chinaʼs enforced inclusion of minorities within extractive communist systems (Kinzley, Reference Kinzley2018; Yeh, Reference Yeh2013) was more destructive than Indiaʼs displacement of its Indigenous peoplesʼ lands (Gergan, Reference Gergan2023), yet both territorialising projects were exploitative. Their 1970s interest in Antarctic and Southern Ocean resources marked an early extension of their extractive interests beyond their borders. From the late 1970s, both nations began seeking resources and markets abroad to support their populations and infrastructure development (Bhattacharjea, Reference Bhattacharjea2022), prompting a major shift in the global economy and accelerating ecological change.

India and China were by no means the first nations attempting to exploit the Antarctic and Southern Ocean. Imperial adventurers began extracting multiple mammal species from the region in the seventeenth century and decimated fur seal populations; these practices were so destructive that even the British Falkland Islands Dependencies banned the Southern Ocean sealing industry in 1909 (Hofman, Reference Hofman2017). Commercial “whale harvesting” surged from 1904, peaking between the late 1920s and the 1950s. For decades after it formed, the ATS did little to curb Antarctic extraction. Its only early environmental restriction banned nuclear activities, and this resulted from concerns about world peace rather than environmental protection (Antonello, Reference Antonello2019). By 1964, the ATS introduced some measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora, but they were limited, banning loud sounds and flying aircraft near wildlife and insisting that dogs be restrained.

The balance between resource extraction and species protection shifted further towards extraction in the 1970s when the Soviet Union developed technology to harvest Southern Ocean Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides), Antarctic toothfish (Dissostichus mawsoni), and most transformatively, Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba). Krill became the Southern Oceanʼs most lucrative catch, and its conservation has remained one of the regionʼs most urgent ecological issues (Antonello, Reference Antonello2019). Antarctic krillʼs main products, fish meal and fish oil, are highly nutritious and easily transportable, but this species underpins the Southern Oceanʼs ecosystem, providing food for other animals and fertilising the ocean with its shells. With an estimated biomass of 379 million tonnes, it is the planetʼs largest wild species by organic mass (Atkinson et al., Reference Atkinson, Siegel, Pakhomov, Jessopp and Loeb2009).

Scientists and conservationists responded with alarm to the Soviet fishing surge, adding their protests to some ATS membersʼ ongoing concerns about whaling and sealing. However, the ATSʼs consensus-based structure slowed its response to the unfolding crisis. It adopted the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals in 1972, but only established a comprehensive fisheries management system during the 1980 negotiation (and 1982 enforcement) of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). CCAMLR stopped 1970s levels of overfishing but permitted the “rational use” of fish stocks (Rothwell, Reference Rothwell1990). Managing whaling in the Antarctic took even longer, with the International Whaling Commission stakeholders only agreeing to a commercial whaling moratorium in 1982.

Indian and Chinese elites observed these 1970s developments from outside the ATS. Chinese scholars, intrigued by the debates, conducted their first research into Antarctica, noting how the Sovietsʼ new fishing technology could increase food supplies (He, Reference He2016; Wang & Wang, Reference Wang and Wang2021; Wang, Reference Wang2024). Tensions over Antarctica continued into the early 1980s when NAM, this time led by Malaysia, reintroduced “the Antarctica Question” to the UN. Malaysiaʼs 1983 complaint echoed earlier Indian and Chinese critiques that the ATS served “the privileged few” (Dodds & Collis, Reference Dodds, Collis, Dodds, Hemmings and Roberts2017; Beck, Reference Beck2006). Yet this time, China and India responded ambiguously to Malaysiaʼs provocation: while indirectly supporting Malaysiaʼs stance, they broke ranks with their Global South peers and joined the ATS. China joined in 1983 and became a consultative member in 1985. Despite concerns about the impact of its decision on NAM members, India joined in 1983 and became a consultative member the same year (Imam, Reference Imam1982). Its accession raised suspicion among ATS members and disappointed its NAM allies (Dey, Reference Dey1991). Following Malaysiaʼs appeal, “the Antarctica Question” remained on the UN agenda for twenty-two years. The ATS collaborated with the UN Secretary-General to produce reports aligning its efforts with UN principles—initially issued annually (1983–1994), then biannually (1996–1999), and triennially (1999–2005)—until the question was removed from the agenda in 2005 (Beck, Reference Beck2006). As this oversight continued, Malaysia also shifted its stance on the ATS. Like many other NAM members, it launched its own Antarctic Research Programme and became a non-consultative member in 2011.

While Malaysia and other NAM nations challenged the ATS at the UN, China, and India began to negotiate within it. Their entry preceded a new round of complex talks on Antarctic resource management, this time focusing on minerals. At the ATSʼs eleventh meeting in Buenos Aires (June 1981), disagreements over minerals governance led the members to form a committee to draft the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA). While the committee deliberated, India (1983), Brazil (1983), and China (1985) all gained ATS consultative status, and global attitudes towards Antarctic mining started to shift. Australia was the first to change its stance on mining, breaking the CRAMRA consensus, and calling for Antarctica to become a “wilderness park.” An influential Greenpeace campaign increased the pressure, advocating for it to become a “world park.” When the Exxon Valdez spilt oil in the Arctic in 1989, opposition to Antarctic mineral extraction grew even stronger. ATC consultative countries, including Belgium, France, and India, supported Australiaʼs call for CRAMRA to be renegotiated (Jackson, Reference Jackson2021). India, which joined CCAMLR the same year it was granted consultancy status in 1985, was particularly effusive in its support for Australiaʼs stance. However, documents suggest that longer-term ATS members doubted its motives, suspecting it still favoured a “commons” approach (Jayaram, Reference Jayaram, Scott, Stephens and McGee2024).

The ATS dropped CRAMRA and began negotiating a Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (AEP). ATS members eventually signed the protocol in Madrid in 1991 (it is also called the “Madrid Protocol”), and it came into effect in 1998. The protocol did not establish Antarctica as a “world park,” or even a “wilderness park,” but it did designate it a “Natural Reserve, Devoted to Peace and Science” (Jackson, Reference Jackson2021). Article 7 prohibits activity related to non-research mineral resources, and Annexe V calls for a “systematic environmental-geographic framework” to identify areas for protection and management. It also requires stakeholders and other visitors to Antarctica to undertake environmental impact assessments and waste disposal.

Unlike their Indian counterparts, the Chinese government was reluctant to sign CCAMLR, only doing so under pressure in 2007 after it had been held primarily responsible for a spike in illegal fishing, particularly of krill, throughout the 1990s (Bergin & Press, Reference Bergin and Press2020). While English-language studies, including those from India and China, have generally presented the Madrid Protocols as a historical positive, not all Chinese-language studies agree. Wang (Reference Wang2024), for instance, decries the “political correctness” of post-Protocol discourse, complaining that Antarctic mineral and resource development has rarely been raised since the Protocolʼs inception and seldom studied.

Despite outpacing its Western competitors in some environmental arenas, Chinaʼs environmental record in the Southern Ocean has not been impressive. Since signing CCAMLR, it partnered with Norway to increase its krill extraction capacity within CCAMLRʼs “rational use” guidelines (Liu & Brooks, Reference Liu and Brooks2018). With growing demand—especially from China and India—the total krill catch has quadrupled since the early 2000s (CCAMLR Secretariat, 2023), and the Chinese share of the catch is growing. In the early 2020s, Norway still accounted for 63.2% of the Southern Ocean krill catch, but Chinaʼs share had increased to 16.4%. Chinese-language opinion pieces in government-sponsored media outlets encourage Chinese fishery firms to exploit Antarcticaʼs “oceanic gold mine” (haishang jink uang) (Sohu.com, 2024) and “blue granary” (lanse liangcang) (Yang, Wang & Wei, 2023). Along with this increase in krill production, Chinese state representatives have also worked with Russia to block the creation of new Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in the Antarctic. ATS members have proposed a network of MPAs at every CCAMLR annual meeting since 2009. Only two have been approved: the South Orkney MPA (2009) and the Ross Sea MPA (2016). China and Russia blocked the approval of the Ross Sea MPA for five years from 2011, and only approved it after the protected area was reduced by two-thirds, and the total catch volume were left unchanged (Brooks et al., Reference Brooks, Crowder, Österblom and Strong2020).

In 2018, several ATS members proposed three new MPAs in East Antarctica, the Weddell Sea, and the Antarctic Peninsula. China and Russia blocked these proposals and have blocked them every year since, including in 2024, when the CCCAMLR meeting coincided with the mass deaths of emperor penguin chicks and news that a variant of avian flu had reached Antarctica (Amos, Reference Amos2023; The Guardian, 2023). Multiple analysts attribute Chinaʼs resistance to these measures to their reliance on Southern Ocean fisheries (Press, Reference Press2023). However, analyst Nengye Liu (Reference Liu2016) proposes a more historical explanation. He attributes it to an “anxiousness for commons,” analogous to “cartographic anxiety” about borders, which views MPAs as a symbol of locked global commons, which the Chinese people may need in the future.

Joining the Elite Antarctic Club (1980s-2010s)

Along with contributions to ATS diplomacy and their eventual involvement in Southern Ocean fisheries, the Indian and Chinese accession to the ATC also enabled them to expand their on-the-ground Antarctic scientific activities significantly. Both nations had to develop their Antarctic scientific capabilities before sending expeditions to the continent. Prime Minister Gandhi personally facilitated the inclusion of Indian scientists on two polar expeditions, one led by Australia (1961) and another led by the Soviet Union (1971–73) (Dey, Reference Dey1991). The Indian Emergency (1975–1977), during which Gandhi suspended democracy and ruled by decree, interrupted Indiaʼs Antarctic ambitions, but she reignited them shortly afterwards. In 1981, she established the Department of Ocean Development (DOD), appointing herself as its first director, and authorised the “unauthorised” Gangotri 1 expedition. In the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament, she described it as “a proud moment for India [as] we were able to break the monopoly of the rich and developed countries over Antarctica” (quoted in Agnihotri, Reference Agnihotri2002).

India was still not a treaty member when the second Gangotri expedition spent 77 days in Antarctica during the 1982-83 summer. This expedition established a camp called Dakshin Gangotri and installed Intelsat telex and telephone links to India (Imam, Reference Imam1982). Gandhi told the Lok Sabha that this was “one more proof… that Indian scientists and technologists have the capability to undertake the most hazardous and complex tasks” (Beck, Reference Beck1983, 106). After India finally joined the ATS in 1983, it increased the programmeʼs size and the duration of its expeditions. The third expedition set up an all-season base at Dakshin Gangotri, with several members wintering there, creating a permanent colony (Khadilkar, Reference Khadilkar2017; Beck, Reference Beck1983). These scientistsʼ memoirs reveal how demanding the programme was on Indiaʼs resources; they faced cold, equipment failures, and health issues (Khadilkar, Reference Khadilkar2017; Qasim, Reference Qasim2019). However, the memoirs also convey a sense of nationalist and even globalist purpose. This dual sense of duty was also evident when the Indian Antarctic Programmeʼs head, Sayed Zahur Qasim (1926–2015), outlined Indiaʼs four main objectives for joining the ATS: (1) gaining access to the polar regionʼs resources; (2) environmental preservation; (3) investigating India-Antarctic geophysical links, including the monsoon “from which [India] derives most of its fertility and energy”; and (4) “Indiaʼs intention to project her own views as well as those of the non-aligned countries” (Qasim, Reference Qasim1983, 74–78). In 1988, the programme added a larger second research base, Maitri, which housed 25 people year-round and 40 in summer. At this base, it focused on climatological and geological studies, including drilling the Central Dronning Maud Land ice-core, data from which Indian scientists utilised to analyse the monsoon, the Southern Oscillation Index, and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (Walawalkar, Reference Walawalkar2005) (Figure 1).

After “invading” the continent on its first expedition, Indiaʼs subsequent activities on the continent raised few complaints until 2006, when its announcement at that yearʼs Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM) that it intended to build a new base revealed ongoing cultural, if not geopolitical, divisions within the ATS. As Jessica OʼReilly (Reference OʼReilly2011) outlined in her study of the 2006 ATCM, India wanted to build its new base in the Larsemann Hills because they held both geological and, controversially, cultural significance in India. The hills extend along a stretch of Antarctic shoreline that geological evidence shows was connected to India in the Gondwana supercontinent, around 96 million years ago. Geologists also believe that the headwaters of the Godavari River, which now flow through southern India, once descended from these hills. The connection to the Godavari was meaningful in India. This sacred river is also known as the Dakṣiṇī Ganga (“Southern Ganga”), a name connected to the programmeʼs first base, Dakshin Gangotri, whose name means the “southern source of the Ganges.” There were, furthermore, reasons Indians may have wanted to reclaim the name “Gondwana.” “Gondwana” is a nineteenth-century British corruption of Goṇḍavana, which means “the forest of the Gonds.” The Gonds are an Indigenous (or Adivasi) community from South India, in whose lands nineteenth-century geologists first found evidence of Gondwana. The colonisers named the continent for the Gonds because they regarded both this ancient continent and the Gonds as “primitive” (Chakrabarti, Reference Chakrabarti2019). The Indian Antarctic programme did not, however, include this postcolonial context in its justification for the new base. Instead, its representatives focused on the geological connections between India and East Antarctica. Other, more established members of the ATS were unimpressed, especially those planning an ASMA in the Larsemann Hills. After complaining about Indiaʼs ignorance of ATS processes and procedures, these countries eventually reached a compromise, allowing India to establish its next base, Bharati, in the Larsemann Hills in 2012 (OʼReilly, Reference OʼReilly2017). Bharati is still there, and can accommodate 47 people in winter, and an additional 25 in summer.

Chinaʼs Antarctic programme developed during the same decade as Indiaʼs, but from the outset, it followed a different trajectory with grander ambitions. Unlike the Indian government, the Chinese government operated within the ATS to establish its programme. Before launching its first expedition, it embedded thirty-five Chinese scientists in cooperative research teams across Antarctica and, in 1981, established the National Antarctic Expedition Committee (He, Reference He2016; Brady, Reference Brady2010). Its polar focus was part of a broader societal transformation in the late 1970s, after Maoʼs death. In 1978, Chinaʼs new paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), while committing the nation to reform and opening up, emphasised the role science and technology would play in the new China, acting as “the primary productive forcesʼʼ (quoted in Zhang and Haward, Reference Zhang and Haward2022, 192).

After joining the ATS, the Chinese government established the Arctic and Antarctic Administration within the Ministry of Land and Resources. Unlike Indiaʼs programme, Chinaʼs was focused on both polar regions. Its ground activities also differed. While India struggled to maintain one Antarctic base during the 1980s, China built two that were twice as large: Changcheng (Great Wall) (1984) on King George Island, Western Antarctica, housing 25 people in winter and 40 in summer, and Zhongshan (1989), near Bharati, housing 25 people in winter and 120 in summer (Peopleʼs Daily, 2023). These stations continued to operate at the same population levels throughout the nineties and into the 2000s without significant change (Chen, 2008), in what Chinese scholars of Antarctica call the “Consolidation Phase” of its programme. During this period, the programme continued conducting climatological, geological, and related studies, but did not actively promote its presence. This Consolidation Phase coincided with a broader Chinese foreign policy to “keep a low profile and make some contributions” (He, Reference He2016).

Two events in the late 2000s changed Chinaʼs broader foreign and Antarctic policy. The first, in 2007, was Russia planting a flag on the Arctic seafloor, claiming sovereignty over it (Dodds & Rowe, Reference Dodds and Rowe2021). This drew Chinese domestic attention to polar affairs and encouraged their participation in the fourth IPY, which took place from 2007 to 2009 (Wang, Reference Wang2024). During this IPY, China established a new summer base, Kunlun, near Dome A (or Argus), one of the continentʼs highest points. The second event that changed China was the 2008 financial crisis, which Chinese commentators view as a “historic shift in power” towards them (He, Reference He2016) (Figure 2).

Along with several reorganisations of its administrative structure—which remains, according to multiple critics, too uncoordinated (Wang, Reference Wang2024; Brady, Reference Brady2017; Chen & Zhang, Reference Chen, Zhang, Scott, Stephens and McGee2024)—Russiaʼs flag planting and the Westʼs financial woes combined to provide more support to Chinaʼs Antarctic programme. The renamed Chinese National Antarctic Research Expeditions (CHINARE) launched its first large-scale ice-core drilling project near Kunlun in 2011. (It continues today, competing with other charismatic ice-core programmes such as Australiaʼs Million Year Ice Core (MUSIC) and Europeʼs Beyond EPICA project.) Shortly after, the programme established another inland summer station, Tianshan (2014), and Xi Jinping travelled to Tasmania and New Zealand to sign agreements on Antarctic cooperation with Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand) (He, Reference He2016). The following year, the new National Security Law included polar security for the first time (Wang, Reference Wang2024). This allowed money to flow to satellite navigation, upper atmosphere physics, geomagnetics, auroras, and infrared astronomy.

The programme received a further boost in 2017 when Xi Jinping used his UN speech in Geneva to announce that Chinaʼs new foreign policy would focus on exploring “strategic new frontiers” (zhanlue xinjiang yu): the deep sea, outer space, cyberspace, and the poles. This new initiative was accompanied by increased funding for Antarctic research in Chinaʼs fifth (2016–2020) and sixth (2021–2025) five-year plans (Andersson, Reference Andersson2021; Tsang & Cheung, Reference Tsang and Cheung2023). The Chinese programmeʼs growth continued into the 2020s, when they established the all-weather Qinling Station (2024) on Inexpressible Island in Terra Nova Bay, which accommodates 30 in winter, and an additional 50 in summer (Lei, Reference Lei2024). The government expanded the project again in 2025, announcing plans to collaborate with Russia to drill Antarcticaʼs deepest ice-core and to build another new summer station at Marie Byrd Land, near an abandoned Russian station, Russkaya (Gibson, Reference Gibson2025).

As their histories indicate, Indiaʼs and Chinaʼs Antarctic programmes have been closely linked to broader efforts to expand their technological and industrial capacity. Along with their Antarctic missions, these efforts have also developed their nuclear weapons and space programmes; they are two of only four nation-states to have successfully landed spacecraft on the moon. To achieve these ends, both governments have consistently fostered cultures that venerate science and engineering. Initially, these technological skills were portrayed as tools of postcolonial nation-building (Andreas, Reference Andreas2009; Sajjanhar, Reference Sajjanhar2024). However, in the twenty-first century, in both countries, their two dominant nationalist leaders, Xi Jinping—who trained as a chemical engineer—and Indiaʼs Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, have both promoted and been supported by “techno-nationalism.” Modi relies on a large group of technically trained Hindu nationalist technocrats to support him (Sajjanhar, Reference Sajjanhar2024), while Xi draws support from “red and expert” engineers and technocrats (Wijaya & Jayasuriya, Reference Wijaya and Jayasuriya2024), including the growing number of engineers he has brought into the Chinese Communist Partyʼs Politburo (Yu, Reference Yu2023). Although both leaders draw on these technologist classes for support, the Chinese stateʼs investment in technology vastly overshadows Indiaʼs efforts, including in Antarctica. India continues to prioritise Antarctic scientific research and exploration and conducts annual expeditions to its bases. Its 2022 Antarctica Act aims to reduce its reliance on third-party equipment, buy a new research vessel by 2029, co-build icebreakers with Russia (Linganna, Reference Linganna2023), and construct a new base, Maitri II (The Hindu, 2024; Jayaram, Reference Jayaram, Scott, Stephens and McGee2024), but the program receives much less funding and support than Chinaʼs programme. There are calls for it to encourage its fishing industry in the Southern Ocean—it is the second-largest importer of krill products after China—and, given its developed pharmaceutical industry, obtain bioprospecting—the systematic search for biological products from plants, animals, and microbes that can be produced commercially—licenses from the ATS. India has also increased navy patrols in the Indian Ocean because of concerns about Chinese activities (Sharma, Reference Sharma2023). However, none of this will expand its Antarctic programme beyond its current, mid-level status It is unlikely to catch up to Chinaʼs programme.

Perhaps, the comparison between the two programmes is unfair. Chinaʼs plans for Antarctica as one of its “strategic new frontiers” (zhanlue xinjiang yu) is, after all, unprecedented. Although the Chinese government does not state publicly that it aims to be a jidi qiangguo (“Polar Great Power”) (Brady, Reference Brady2017), it has indicated its intention to be both a great scientific power and influential in polar politics. These two ambitions feed into each other. It has, for example, invested so much in science and technology that many overseas-trained scientists—known as “sea turtles” (haigui)—have returned to conduct domestic research in fields such as ice-core analysis (Wu, Reference Wu2024). It is particularly invested in developing its Arctic capacities through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Chen & Zhang, Reference Chen, Zhang, Scott, Stephens and McGee2024), but it has also significantly stepped up its Antarctic research. President Xi Jinping has even demonstrated personal interest in the Antarctic programme, notably visiting the icebreaker Xue Long in Hobart, Australia, in 2015 (Perlez, Reference Perlez2015).

For some Chinese commentators, the poles represent another arena where China can compete with and surpass the United States. In this context, China positions itself as a counter-hegemonic force, a post-colonial “developing country” (Chen & Zhang, Reference Chen, Zhang, Scott, Stephens and McGee2024) advocating for the “democratisation” of international relations and opposing the dominance of any single power (Tsang & Cheung, Reference Tsang and Cheung2023). Competing with the US in Antarctica is difficult. Chen Yugang (quoted in Wang, Reference Wang2024) argues that Antarctic state actors have five main strategic strengths in the Antarctic: territorial, security, scientific, economic, and symbolic strengths. He believes only the US possesses all five, but China can compete with the US by partnering with smaller, geographically adjacent countries such as Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand).

Chinaʼs emphasis on broad-based science and technological progress in its rivalry with the US is also noteworthy (Sorensen, Reference Sorensen2024). The two trajectories of their scientific investment diverge starkly; Chinaʼs government expenditure is increasing, whereas the US is shifting wealth into the private technology sector. Other Antarctic nationsʼ concerns about Chinaʼs ambitions focus on its governance structure: it is a party-state in which the military and civilian activities are integrated. These fears have intensified since the government introduced its “new national system” (xinxing juguo tizhi ), a policy that strengthens military-civilian links to decouple Chinaʼs economy from the US (Wijaya & Jayasuriya, Reference Wijaya and Jayasuriya2024). These links have created international concerns about aspects of Chinaʼs activities in Antarctica, such as satellite surveillance infrastructure at Qinling (Buchanan, Reference Buchanan2024; Antonello, Reference Antonello2020), but there is limited evidence that these activities are environmentally harmful or more advanced than those of the US or Russia (Jiang, Reference Jiang2022).

Indiaʼs role in this competition could diffuse tensions by re-engaging with China. Rather than bipolar competition between the US and China, India wants to develop a multipolar world, with it as one of many poles. To acheive this end, India has to manage difficult relationships with the United States, China, and maintain its strong historical relationship with Russia. It has also joined forums such as BRICS with both Russia and China. China, for its part, and particularly in the Antarctic context, has a habit of either ignoring India or expecting its deference. For example, its proposal to create an Asian Antarctic cooperation mechanism, which shares scientific interests and goals (He, Reference He2016), does not mention India.

Civilizational Positioning Systems (2010s–2020s)

Another element of Indiaʼs and Chinaʼs developing relationship with Antarctica is its role in their new geographic imaginings. More recent Chinese and Indian worldmaking has tended to combine two senses of their nationʼs place in the world, which geographers have called their two geographies (Abraham, Reference Abraham and Pant2019) or “two (geo-)bodies” (Grant, Reference Grant2018). These geographies build upon nation-state geographies or geo-bodies (Winichakul, Reference Winichakul1997) but extend spatially and temporally beyond them. In their vastness, they overshadow their humiliation within the liberal colonial order and the creation of their modernist nations in the post-World War II nation-state world system. Instead, they create a contemporary geopolitical sphere of influence and evoke “civilisational states” with ahistorical antecedents. This civilisation heritage and its perceived far-reaching influence feed a sense of “civilisational exceptionalism” that fuels worldmaking discourses. India uses the regional Akhand Bharat (Greater India) concept to express this, and China uses the globalist tian xia (“all under heaven”) to tell its story. These discourses shape the place-making of both statesʼ Antarctic programmes, and the programmes orient these discourses

The two stories reflect earlier, post-colonial geographies, such as their national efforts to maintain “geo-bodies” large enough in space and population that they could resist Western hegemony. They also reflect both nationsʼ “cartographic anxieties” (Krishna, Reference Krishna1994) about the blurred boundaries of their imperial inheritances, which contributed to Indiaʼs Partition, and ultimately the Sino-Indian War of 1962 that was fought over disputed Himalayan territory. After this war, both states promoted discourses delimiting their geo-bodies between the Asian Highlands (the Tibetan Plateau and its surrounds) and oceans, the Pacific for China and the Indian ocean for India, with the mountains and seas acting as shields or boundaries to civilisational inlands.

As they advanced technologically from the 1980s onwards, both nations began reinterpreting their histories as parts of civilisational states. Within this civilisational worldmaking framework, current nation-states are depicted as the latest iteration of a great civilisation that existed before Western imperialism and is now regaining its place in the global order. These visions allow for some cosmopolitanism but tend to promote an exceptionalist and essentialist ahistorical vision of “China” or “India” as a “timeless entity” with a “fixed, single essence” (Chu, Reference Chu2022, 74). Both Indian and Chinese civilisational discourses reveal long-term strategic ambitions to reclaim their historic pre-eminence in global affairs, though they express these strategies through cultural-political geographies that differ in scope and, therefore, in ambition.

Indiaʼs geopolitical attention may extend globally, primarily through large Indian diasporas (Srivastava, Reference Srivastava2023), but its cultural geographies are concentrated in its South Asian neighbourhood. In official discourse, this expanding influence is presented as a geopolitical necessity, especially in response to Chinaʼs growing influence in the Indian Ocean (Bhatti, Kharl & Butt, Reference Bhatti, Kharl and Butt2020). However, it is framed culturally, emphasising Indiaʼs historical civilisation links to this region. In non-official discourse, particularly that produced by Hindu nationalists, culture is given even greater importance, and rhetoricians frequently refer to Akhand Bharat or “Greater India.” In some extreme contexts, Akhand Bharat is presented as a call for Indian imperial expansion, but mainly, the term signifies a desire to centre India within a reframed South Asia that stretches beyond territorial borders to unify the region through its “shared civilisational history” (Srivastava, Reference Srivastava2023, 466).

The borders between Indiaʼs territorial nation-building, official regional-focused geopolitical worldmaking, and the civilisational geography of Akhand Bharat are blurred and changeable. They often extend across the Indian Ocean and occasionally reach Antarctica. Over the course of Indiaʼs Antarctic programme, both official and personal rhetoric have repeatedly used scientific—geological, climatological, and hydrological—referents to link India and Antarctica. The geological-cultural links that commentators made between the Godavari River and Bharati, exemplify this, but there are others. Early in the Indian Antarctic programme, its first leader, Syed Zahoor Qasim, highlighted India-Antarctica connections by suggesting the Himalaya and Antarctica served as geographical boundaries within which India and the Southern Ocean “communicate” (Taneja, Reference Taneja2016). Indian Antarctic scientists have also made repeated connections between the Himalayan and Antarctic cryospheres in their reports and reflections. In 2022, the National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research emphasised Indiaʼs need to increase its role in the poles, citing the “tri-polar connection” between the poles and the “ʼthird poleʼ in the Himalaya” (Suryanarayanan, Reference Suryanarayanan2022). Many military support personnel working in Antarctica, including the first Indian to reach the South Pole, Colonel Jatinder Kumar Bajaj, trained at Himalayan mountaineering institutes before travelling to Antarctica (Sharma, Reference Sharma2001, 251–252). Moreover, those involved in the Himalayan frontier and Antarctica are often depicted similarly: as national, hyper-masculine heroes with frozen moustaches (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Left, The first Indian expedition to Antarctica, Indian Express, 2023. Right, Bajaj at the South Pole, 1989, Creative Commons.

Figure 2.

Left, The inauguration of Changzheng Station, Antarctica 1983. Right, a stamp marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty in 1991, featuring Zhongshan. Station, Creative Commons.

Chinaʼs twenty-first-century civilisational worldmaking extends well beyond its geo-body and Indiaʼs regional ambitions. It is most notably supported and bolstered by the BRI, which includes the development of a “Polar Silk Road” (Bing shang sichou zhi lu) to transport goods by sea between northern China and Europe via Russiaʼs Arctic (Woon, Reference Woon2020). However, writers discussing the Antarctic Programme eschew the BRI framing for a more moralistic and adaptable political-cultural concept, tian xia. Tian xia, literally “sky (or heaven) beneath,” is typically translated as “all under heaven.” It is a broad term encompassing all humanity and their environments, and this expansive character has allowed it to become a floating signifier, used in multiple ways across different historical and contemporary contexts (Rigby, Reference Rigby2013). Its two most common contemporary uses are as a general term meaning “the entire world” or “world-beating.” However, in geospatial or international relations theory, it denotes a more spatially defined and morally infused version of the English term “world society” (Babones, Reference Babones2020). Some Chinese international relations scholars present tian xia as an alternative to the Western-centric, Global North-dominated world system, which they describe as “epistemic colonialism” (Chu, Reference Chu2022, 59). According to these scholars, tian xia represents “an institutionalised system to promote universal well-being, not simply the interests of some dominating nations” (Rigby, Reference Rigby2013, 1). Unlike many Western territorial perspectives, tian xia encompasses both physical (territory) and psychological (national sentiment) realms, and includes a cooperative institutional framework. Such a framework, they argue, would be inherently more effective at fostering stability and peace than the current nation-state-based international system (Chu, Reference Chu2022).

The concept of tian xia differs from the older European worldview that shaped Antarctic visions in that it is more horizontal than vertical, and therefore not properly hegemonic. However, it is still based on problematic assumptions that influence both it and Chinaʼs Antarctic programme. Instead of positioning China as a hegemon, it adheres to an older Chinese tradition and reorders the globe with China—or Zhongguo, the “middle country”—at its moral centre. In pre-modern models, the imperial capital was the centre, and the “level of civilisation gradually [falling] as one travelled farther away from the centre” (Babones, Reference Babones2020, 134). Great civilisational states were known by how far their influence extended. As Sinan Chu (Reference Chu2022) explains, this centre-to-periphery vision does not critique the nature of power or who holds it, but aims to order the world from an unconscious Chinese (or Han), male, and urban viewpoint. In this framework, journeys by Chinese urbane men to frontiers are considered a “civilising mission” on behalf of amorphous categories of beings such as “all Chinese,” “Global South countries,” and indeed, all humankind.

Like their Indian counterparts, Chinese imagery and literature depicting journeys to the Antarctic frontier repeatedly align Antarctica with the Asian Highlands and present their journeys as a hyper-masculine adventure. Guo Kun, the leader of Chinaʼs first 1983-4 expedition, recalled that they were all asked to sign “a death warrant” (shengsi zhuang) before departing, but were moved to travel because of their love for China (Sina.com, 2021).

While Chinese and Indian Antarctic rhetoric has been remarkably similar in some respects, it also differs in other ways. For example, twenty-first-century Chinese state-run media reports have been much more jingoistic than their Indian counterparts. Some recent exemplary headlines have read: “My countryʼs polar mapping has become a force that cannot be ignored in the world” (Woguo jidi ce tu yijing yuesheng chengwei shijie shang buke hushi de liliang) (China Today, 2006), and “Striving for a Strong Country in Science and Technology: Zhongshan Towers in the Antarctic Ice and Snow” (Bingxue nanji weiwei “zhongshan”: keji qiangguo fen dou zhi lu) (Peopleʼs Daily, 2023). These headlines began appearing around the time the Chinese state began intently promoting its civilisational state narratives in the late 2000s, and increased as they rolled out their strategic frontiers policies a decade later.

As this last headline highlights, rhetoric also has a symbiotic relationship with on-the-ice place-making. This place-making includes “banal nationalism” (Billig Reference Billig1995), like the use of flags, plaques, national holidays, languages, food choice, the group practice of tai chi and yoga—a particular cultural export of Indiaʼs current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi (see Figure 3)—along with the layout and architectural style of the programmesʼ buildings. The latest Chinese building, Qinling Station, for example, was designed in the shape of the Southern Cross to honour the Ming-dynasty general Zheng He (1371–1433), who used the constellation to navigate through the Indian and Pacific Oceans (Lei, Reference Lei2024) (see Figure 4). Arguably, however, the most apparent way both programmes have extended their cultural geographies into Antarctica is through names.

Figure 3.

International Yoga Day in Antarctica NDTV, 2016.

Figure 4.

Qinling station, Antarctica. Xinhua, 2024.

Naming and the right to name directly reflect either imperial control or resistance to it (Williamson, Reference Williamson2023). European states are easily world leaders in claiming land by naming it, and they have continued this practice into the twenty-first century, with Britain renaming a disputed section of the Antarctic Peninsula “Queen Elizabeth Land” to celebrate Queen Elizabethʼs fiftieth year as sovereign in December 2012. Chinese scholars such as Wang Wanliu (2024) interpret these cultural naming practices as the continuing colonisation of supposedly neutral spaces. However, this insight has not stopped either China or India imitating this Western tradition . All the names the Chinese and Indian Antarctic programmes have given to their expeditions and stations are loaded with cultural significance.

The Indian programmeʼs naming practices have followed two trends. The first explicitly links India to Antarctica by naming places after significant Indian sites. The most obvious and repeated of these is Gangotri, the glacial source of the Ganges River in the Himalaya, and a sacred site associated with the goddess Ganga. The name of the expeditionʼs first station, Dakshin Gangotri (Southern Gangotri), makes the Himalaya-Antarctica link explicit. Jagadish P. Khadilkar, who led Dakshin Gangotri for several years until it was decommissioned in 1990, described the stationʼs name as “taking the flavour of our cultural icon to the bottom of the earth” (Khadilkar Reference Khadilkar2017, chapter 1). As previously mentioned, situating Bharati Station among the headwaters of the primaeval Godavari River, which is also known as Dakshin Ganga (or Ganges), plays with the links between the two rivers and the two continents.

The second trend has been to name sites after religious beings and concepts. The first expedition discovered an underwater mountain, which they named Indira Mount after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who was, in turn, named after a goddess. Indiaʼs second station was named Bharati, after the Hindu goddess of knowledge and music. The third stationʼs name, Maitri (“love and kindness”), is also the name of a Hindu goddess, but the term is more usually associated with Buddhism, a religion that has become one of the prime signifiers in Indiaʼs civilisational state and Akhand Bharat discourse. All these terms, like the promotion of yoga practice, reflect Indiaʼs spiritual soft power. When these stations were built, these allusions were generally low-key, but in the age of Modiʼs Hindu nationalism, the governmentʼs promotion of Indiaʼs spiritual heritage has become more aggressive (Srivastava, Reference Srivastava2023).

Chinese naming in Antarctica has also followed two trends. In the early stages of the programme, the stations were named for well-known Chinese icons. The first, Changcheng Station, was built as China emerged from isolation in 1985 and was named after the Great Wall. The second Zhongshan, meaning “middle mountain,” was the pen name of nationalist revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, whose political vision referenced tian xia, “all under heaven for the public” (tian xia wei gong) (Rigby, Reference Rigby2013). The rest of the stations, all built this century, were named after sacred mountain ranges that shape and connect Chinaʼs contemporary geo-body to Antarctica. Kunlun Station is named for the Kunlun Mountains that form the Tibetan Plateauʼs northern boundary and the outer limits of pre-Qing Chinese empires. The Kunlun Mountains are also the source of the Yellow River and, like Gangotri, are the residence of deities. Taishan Station is named after Mount Tai, Chinaʼs most famous sacred mountain, home to a two-thousand-year-old imperial cult. Qinling Station is named after the Qinling Mountains, which run through central China and separate the Yellow and Yangzi River catchments. In an official naming statement, Chinaʼs General Secretary Xi Jinping demonstrated how civilisational state narratives work, saying: “The Qinling Mountains unite the north and the south, benefitting the whole world. They are my countryʼs central water tower, the ancestral vein of the Chinese nation, and an important symbol of Chinese culture” (Huo, Reference Huo2024). Journalist Huo Xiaoguang (2024) was more specific. “Kunlun, Taishan, Qinling,” he wrote, “our mountains are in China, in Antarctica, and the dreams of the descendants of the Yellow Emperor [an archetypal national ancestor].”