LONGYEARBYEN, Norway — For anyone in the market for a majestic waterfront property with easy access to the North Pole, Ole Einar Gjerde has a deal. “We will throw in the polar bears for free,” said Mr. Gjerde, pitching the attractions of a huge tract of Arctic land two and a half times bigger than Manhattan but considerably less noisy. It has a human population of zero.

But the sale of the property, across a frigid fjord from Longyearbyen, the capital of Norway’s northernmost territory, has kicked up a noisy storm fed by alarm over the Arctic ambitions of a Chinese real estate tycoon with deep pockets, a yen for ice and a murky past working for the Chinese Communist Party.

The tycoon, Huang Nubo, was rebuffed last year in an attempt to buy a tract of frozen wilderness in Iceland and has turned his attentions to Norway. This summer he reached a preliminary deal to buy a large waterfront plot for about $4 million near the northern city of Tromso and, according to Norway’s state-owned broadcaster, is also eyeing a much bigger and even more northerly property here on Spitsbergen, the main island in the Svalbard archipelago.

Mr. Huang’s company, Beijing Zhongkun Investment Group, denied reports in the Norwegian news media that it wants to buy land here in the high Arctic, and said it is focusing instead on plans for a luxury resort complex in Lyngen, a mountainous area on the Norwegian mainland near Tromso. That project, though centered on land much farther south than Svalbard, still puts Mr. Huang’s company inside the Arctic Circle and has set off a heated debate about his intentions.