Our closest airport to Continental US is located in Fuyuan City, Heilongjiang Province. The distances from Fuyuan to Seattle and San Francisco are about 7,000km and 8,000km respectively.
You assume Russia’s ok with this? What if they say no?
They can just say — “what, we had no idea they overflew our territory, read your own media, our AD is meant to be s#!t”
Hell no. They screw up and end up losing some 50 year old Bear bombers and the West laughs. We're not about to lose H-20 to no terrorists with drone trucks. I don't think we want the expense of building an entire airbase with indigenized defenses in Russia, a place where we are unfamiliar with the local elements. Chinese intelligence is extremely good at catching spies around our military quarters. Someone utters 1 wrong tone to an undercover agent patrolling the area and s/he ends up in a questioning room because s/he is noted as non-native and suspicious. There are stories on the Chinese internet about how 1 spy was caught because he ordered noodles at a local joint and an undercover agent in the shop detected that he initially called the noodles a name that no native person would while using a native accent, thereby deducing that his accent was trained/deliberate. Another spy was caught because he bought something at a shop run by an undercover agent and when paying, the agent saw that he had a non-Chinese coin among the coins his hand. We have absolutely no way to do that in a diverse Russian population.
Russian arctic is basically no man's land, all of what you mentioned isn't too much of a issue since quite literally because this hypothetical military base might be the only permanent human settlement within a god knows how large of a radius, let's say this base will be in Bulunsky on the very edge of Russia. The entire 220000km squared district has just 9000 or so residents. I doubt keeping track of such a low number of population is a difficult thing to do also it'll also be very suspicious for someone to drive all the way up a road(and probably the only road within a large radius of the base) exclusively built for this base with a giant trailer. (Ngl, anyone appearing anywhere remotely near is suspicious because... it's literally in the middle of no where with nothing even remotely nearby no need for complicated counter intelligence) Having access to arctic waters might also allow this base to operate as a forward staging ground for the Chinese underwater fleet in the arctic and also recieve supply(ie. Oil supply but this could also be done via pipelines tapping into the Russian network but having a alternative option is great incase someone blew up the pipelines) via cargo ships. Normal supplies/personnel could be ferried in via regular Y-20 flights etc. The base doesn't have to be extremely large but just large enough to be independent of outside infrastructure.
This is assuming a nuclear war, in a conventional war crippling US industrial centers would be of strategic importance and also demoralizing the enemy like the how Doolittle raid broke the thought that nothing could touch Japanese mainland, China would be at a disadvantage without a way to saturate CONUS with attacks while the US could do to China via Second/third island/Alaskan air bases. US rode out of WW2 unharmed was only due to the fact that noone can reach the CONUS effectively China cannot let this advantage continue on.
then China need forward bases just like USA.. so we should talk with Russia ??