China Condemns Trump’s Justification for Invading Greenland

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: China condemns U.S. President Donald Trump’s justification for seizing Greenland, a notorious crime boss is extradited to China, and a viral app resonates with a disheartened younger generation.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: China condemns U.S. President Donald Trump’s justification for seizing Greenland, a notorious crime boss is extradited to China, and a viral app resonates with a disheartened younger generation.

China Condemns U.S. Rhetoric on Greenland

One justification U.S. President Donald Trump has offered for taking over Greenland is that “if we don’t do it, Russia or China will.” On Monday, China condemned the United States for using supposed Chinese actions as a “pretext” for threatening Greenland—and it’s hard to argue with Beijing on this one.

The idea that China is ready to seize Greenland at any moment is absurd, and Trump’s claims that Chinese destroyers and submarines are circling the island are blatantly false. As the crow flies, China is roughly 4,800 miles from Greenland and considerably farther by any viable sea route. Unlike the United States, China lacks a global network of military bases capable of supporting an operation at that distance; its only overseas naval bases, in Djibouti and Cambodia, are even farther from Greenland.

From Taiwan to the Himalayas, China is rather explicit about its territorial ambitions and border disputes. I have literally never seen a Chinese argument for acquiring Greenland, whether in a strategic paper or in online nationalist fantasy.

Some argue that Trump’s rhetoric here is merely a crude expression of genuine concern about Chinese influence in Greenland. That’s an even weaker argument, and it risks diverting attention from genuinely troubling Chinese influence activities elsewhere in regions that matter far more to Beijing.

It’s true that China has interests in Greenland and the Arctic, particularly in rare-earth deposits. But Greenland’s critical mineral potential is largely hypothetical at this point. There is currently no rare-earths mining in the country, in large part because the deposits lie in extremely remote and inhospitable Arctic territory. Practical obstacles, not government directives, have constrained Chinese exploration, though some firms have invested in prospective sites.

Chinese companies have also invested—or tried to invest—in Greenlandic infrastructure, with some bids reportedly blocked by the Danish government. But not every Chinese commercial venture is part of a grand strategic plan. Like firms everywhere, Chinese companies invest because they want to make money.

This raises a broader question for honest analysts about how to determine what constitutes a threat versus a legitimate interest when it comes to China’s global activities. When China conducts Arctic research missions, is it contributing to global scientific knowledge, or laying the groundwork for power projection? When it seeks to place stations to support its BeiDou satellite navigation system, is that inherently more threatening than comparable U.S. efforts?

U.S. rhetoric about China’s supposed threat to Greenland rarely specifies what China would actually do there, or why. This stands in sharp contrast to China’s sustained influence campaign in the Pacific islands, a region that genuinely matters for Chinese military logistics and the ability to disrupt U.S. supply chains.

The political environment there is also entirely different. Greenland, a stable, semi-autonomous Danish territory, lacks anything resembling the security pacts, political volatility, and patterns of coercion and bribery that have characterized China’s engagement in parts of the Pacific.

It’s telling that the surge in commentary about a Chinese threat to Greenland came after Trump started talking about it. Much of this discourse appears less concerned with U.S. interests or Chinese behavior than retrofitting strategic logic onto Trump’s naked militarism and his assault on U.S. alliances.

What We’re Following

China-Iran relationship. Tehran’s violent repression of ongoing protests has drawn condemnation from Western governments, but not from Beijing. While China hasn’t yet made an official statement, Chinese officials routinely interpret unrest in allied autocracies as an artificial product of foreign subversion, blaming the CIA and other Western actors for so-called color revolutions.

Such solidarity pays diplomatic dividends, and Beijing has been able to count on Iran’s support for China’s oppression of Muslim minorities. Meanwhile, Trump’s threat to impose 25 percent tariffs on countries that trade with Iran is likely to clash with his desire to preserve a trade deal with China—Iran’s largest trading partner.

Crime boss seized. Southeast Asia’s organized crime syndicates have often drawn Beijing’s ire for kidnapping and scamming Chinese citizens. Yet many of these groups are disproportionately run by ethnic Chinese minorities or expatriate Chinese nationals—and face plausible accusations of ties to China’s military and intelligence services.

That context makes the downfall of alleged Chinese-Cambodian mafioso Chen Zhi particularly interesting. Chen, a 38-year-old Fujian native, began his criminal career running a cyber-extortion ring in China in the 2000s. By the 2010s, he had become a major power broker in Cambodia, acquiring citizenship in 2014, cultivating close ties with senior officials, and overseeing scam compounds that often relied on coerced Chinese labor.

A U.S. indictment last October set the stage for the collapse of Chen’s empire, and last week China successfully pressured Cambodia into extraditing him. His removal is unlikely to dismantle Cambodia’s scamming industry, but it may prompt a recalibration—one in which successor figures are more careful about targeting Chinese citizens and drawing Beijing’s attention.

FP’s Most Read This Week

Tech and Business

Viral app. A new Chinese app that lets friends check in on one another—cheekily titled “Are You Dead?,” a pun on a popular food-delivery app—has become a symbol of the fragility and isolation felt by many young Chinese living alone. It quickly topped paid app download charts, though driven more by viral curiosity than actual usage.

The app resonates because it taps into the younger generation’s deep well of frustration and burnout, exacerbated by persistent post-COVID-19 joblessness and growing anxiety about displacement by artificial intelligence. This precarity is hardly new: Slang terms such as yizu and diaosi emerged more than a decade ago to describe the same condition—being stuck on the lowest rungs of the urban ladder, with little hope of climbing higher.

Winter heating. For the first time since 1973, coal generation in both India and China fell last year. China’s energy transition has delivered visible benefits, especially in Beijing, where the smog-choked winters of the 2010s are now largely a thing of the past.

But northern winters are harsh, and rural residents have borne the costs of the push to replace coal heating with natural gas. A sweeping 2017 campaign caused major disruptions after coal heating systems were removed in some places before replacements were installed, prompting temporary policy reversals.

As journalist and analyst Zichen Wang notes in an excellent recent piece, many northern villagers continue to struggle with the higher costs imposed by the energy transition. Coal stoves were highly polluting—but cheap—and the gas subsidies introduced in 2017 are now being phased out.