Aki Tonami is Researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Commentary
China, Japan & the Arctic in 2013
Aki Tonami
In May 2013, after much discussion and speculation, six states were welcomed to become new
Observers at the Arctic Council at the Ministerial Meeting in Kiruna. The six states include China,
Japan, India, Italy, Singapore and South Korea. This commentary will focus on two of the most
prominent new Asian Observer states: China and Japan.
China‘s interests in the Arctic have continued to attract much attention in 2013. The Chinese
government announced that it will boost Arctic research, having acknowledged the role of scientific
research for evaluating risks and opportunities in the Arctic. A few weeks after the AC Ministerial
Meeting, the Polar Research Institute of China announced plans to establish a China-Nordic Arctic
Research Center in Shanghai. The cooperation is based on the existing Icelandic-China cooperation
on the Arctic, and will include several Nordic institutes such as the Iceland Center for Research, the
Norwegian Polar Institute and the Copenhagen-based Nordic Institute of Asian Studies.
China‘s interest in the development of Greenland brought much media attention in 2012, when the
Greenlandic government passed legislation to allow foreign workers into the country to earn salaries
below the local legal minimum wage (Araújo & Cardenal, 2013). This was done in order to meet the
request of the Chinese state-owned banks and companies to modify local regulations to allow low-
wage Chinese workers to work in Greenland. The Chinese intention to invest in Greenland touched
upon sensitive issues of the colonial past of Greenland and Denmark
as well as the future direction
of Greenland (Sejersen, 2013). The issue of Chinese investment in Greenland was perceived as so
important that it became one of the central issues of the Greenlandic national parliamentary election
in March 2013 (Scrutton, 2013). The Siumut party, led by Aleqa Hammond, which has been critical
of the Greenlandic government‘s willingness to accept the Chinese mining companies as well as
their investment money, went on to win the election, suggesting that a significant number of