China's determination to become a global power is enhanced by a new line of development, the Arctic Sea, which represents the northern complement of the central "Silk Road" terrestrial and Southern "pearl necklace" maritime From the Pacific Ocean, to the Indian Ocean, to Persian Gulf and Africa. A difficult Arctic route through the Bering Strait, the Sea of Siberia, the Kara Sea, the Svalbard islands.
Chinese investment in Greenland
This is demonstrated by the recent news on the willingness to financially support the enlargement of the 3 airports (Ilulissat, Nuuk, Quaqortoq) that Greenland would like to implement in the coming years, in order to accommodate more tourists, by the Colossus Chinese CCCC (China Communications Construction Company) which has already subscribed in 2017 contracts for over 32 billion dollars for the construction of overseas infrastructure, including many in Europe, including Italy. Not for nothing the tourist movement from China to Greenland has gone from 9,500 units of 2007 to Ben 86,000 of 2017: important figures for a country that, as is known, counts just over 56 thousand inhabitants, but has a territory of over 2 million of square kilometers , eighty percent of which are covered by ice.
A huge space that hides important mineral resources, something that China is well aware of, since the Chinese company Shenghe Resources already owns 12.5% of the exploratory project on rare earth (rare earthelements, REE) kuannersuit/ Kvanefijeld, located at Narsaq, at the southern tip of Greenland.
The game China, Russia and the United States
The island is of course also of extraordinary strategic relevance for the control of the polar routes: few remember that the North American weather bases established in Greenland during the Second World War were fundamental to provide vital information for The Anglo-American strategic bombing of Germany.
Even today the United States, which have always had a privileged relationship with Denmark, from which Greenland is trying to make itself increasingly autonomous, have here military installations Insostuibili: Suffice it to remember the Thule Air Base which is the most North American bases, in a strategic position, located just half way between Washington and Moscow, and therefore dominating all the world polar routes.
China hopes meanwhile to be able to relocate scientific and satellite stations in the country, creating a first skeleton precisely for that "Arctic Silk Road" that can not but worry the United States of America, which inevitably look with suspicion to the possible Military and intelligence use of Greenland by the Chinese.
There is no doubt however that the Chinese Arctic route presupposes the permanence of strategic agreements with Russia, without which the crossing of the northern seas would be extremely problematic: and it is also for this reason that for the United States The current Russian-Chinese cooperation is a question full of unknowns and dangers to its own world hegemony.
It is appropriate to add in conclusion that a stable Chinese presence in this area would assume an epochal value, since it would mark the entry, for the first time in history, of an Asian country in the Atlantic Ocean, that is to say precisely on that strategic axis North-Atlantic that for at least four centuries constitutes the geopolitical backbone of the Anglo-Saxon world hegemony.
