What are the U.S. and China up to in Greenland? One guess.

Technical difficulties (i.e. my forgetting the cable that connects my camera to the computer) means I can’t put up any photos. So you’ll have to wait for the more slice-of-life dispatches of Greenland until Thursday, when I get back, since those will be much improved by having photos.

In the meantime, a little more about the geopolitical angle of what is going on in Greenland. Official delegations from over 20 countries attended Self-Governance Day. Most were nearby European countries or fellow Arctic indigenous people like the Sami from Norway. But the U.S., China, Russia and Japan were there, too. I never managed to find the Russians or see what they were up to. I did find out that the U.S. is looking into opening some sort of diplomatic representation office in Nuuk, which certainly speaks to the importance of the place. (U.S. companies like Chevron, Exxon/Mobil and Alcoa are already working here.)

And there were two women from China’s embassy in Copenhagen, from the trade section. (“So you can tell what China is interested in here,” one Greenland government official told me.) It was apparently China’s first official visit to Greenland. I interrupted their breakfast one morning at the hotel in Nuuk (which has one really good hotel, so pretty much everyone was there) to ask what they were looking at in Greenland. There was a middle-aged woman, who didn’t speak much English, and a younger one who acted as her translator. The older one said something, and the younger one translated into Chinese diplomatese: “We are looking for future areas of cooperation between China and Greenland…” What sort of cooperation? I asked. As the younger one started to translate, the older one interjected: “natural resources.”