The race for resources in the frozen wastes of the Arctic has brought down its first national government, leaving foreign oil and mining companies shivering about the future. Voters in Greenland feared that ministers were surrendering their country's interests to China and foreign multinationals and called an end this week to the government of prime minister Kuupik Kleist.

London Mining, which has a former British foreign minister, Sir Nicholas Bonsor, on the board, has been at the centre of a row in the country after speculation it could bring in 2,000 Chinese workers to build one of the world's biggest iron ore mines expressly to serve steel mills in Beijing.

The activities of Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy, which drilled for oil off Greenland's south-west coast in 2011, had also polarised opinion between those who welcomed the potential for a hydrocarbon strike bringing huge economic wealth and those worried about spills.

The Siumut party in Greenland, led by Aleqa Hammond, has just won 42% of the vote, allowing it to form a coalition government in place of the current ruling party led by Kleist.

The election campaign was dominated by a debate over the activities of foreign investors and concerns among the 57,000 population that Greenland's future could be dictated by the demands of potentially polluting new industries such as mining and oil rather than traditional Inuit trades of fishing and hunting.

Hammond, 47, who was educated in Canada and brought up with traditional skills such as curing seal skins, said she would take a more critical look at Chinese mining investments in Greenland. She also pledged to increase royalties on miners and ensure they talked through staffing plans with trade unions.

"We are welcoming companies and countries that are interested in investing in Greenland," she said in her first interview since the election. "At the same time we have to be aware of the consequences as a people. Greenland should work with countries that have the same values as we have, on how human rights should be respected. We are not giving up our values for investors' sake."

Global warming has caused thawing of sea ice that has made drilling for offshore oil easier and opened up huge amounts of land which are believed to be stuffed with iron ore, copper and rare earth minerals used in tablets and mobile phones.

There is still an acceptance in Greenland that foreign investment is needed to bring in revenues and allow the mainly self-governing country to escape economic dependence on an annual grant from its former colonial power Denmark.

Although a rush by the main oil companies into the Arctic has led to some embarrassing setbacks – Cairn has found nothing off Greenland and Shell has just abandoned drilling plans for this summer off Alaska – there is still keen interest in the region, most notably off Russia.

However, Shell was banned from work off Alaska by the US government this week until it came up with a more robust safety programme. Late last year, a UK House of Commons committee called for a halt to all drilling in the far north until a pan-Arctic response plan was in place. Joan Walley, chair of the environmental audit committee, said: "The infrastructure to mount a big clean-up operation is simply not in place and conventional oil spill response techniques have not been proven to work in such severe conditions."

Recently plans for onshore mining have triggered concern in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. London Mining wants to spend more than £1.5bn on constructing a mine, pipeline and deep sea port in the south-west of the country.

The company said it "does not want to talk" about the impact of the latest political upheaval on its plans but denied it had hired workers from China or anywhere else and said it would not do so until it had permission to proceed with its mine at Isua, 95 miles (150km) east of Nuuk, which could eventually produce 15m tonnes of iron ore a year.

Others with plans are Greenland Minerals and Energy, an Australian-listed company, which wants to mine rare earth minerals at Kvanefjeld and – even more controversially – uranium to fuel nuclear power.

A spokeswoman for the foreign office in Beijing said on Friday: "To my knowledge, no Chinese enterprises have been granted oil, gas or mining licences. There are no Chinese workers entering Greenland." She said a single Chinese company is in the early stages of joining an investment project in Greenland.

A report on the website of China's Ministry of Land and Resources said mining company Sichuan Xinye had held preliminary discussions with London Mining about eventually taking over the Isua scheme. Other Chinese companies digging for business in Greenland were said to include Jiangxi Zhongrun Mining and Jiangxi Union Mining.

Beijing is more openly expansive about its hopes that the thawing ice in the Arctic Ocean will open a new, more direct, shipping route linking east and west.

A Chinese shipping firm is planning the country's first commercial voyage across the Arctic Ocean to the United States and Europe in 2013, a leading Chinese scientist said earlier this week at a conference organised by the Economist magazine in Oslo.

Huigen Yang, director general of the Polar Research Institute of China, said the experimental trip he led last year on the icebreaker Xuelong, or Snowdragon, to explore the route had "greatly encouraged" Chinese shipping companies. Russian and Norwegian shipowners have already started and "one commercial voyage by a Chinese shipping company may take place this summer," said the scientist.

Yang showed delegates at a conference about the Arctic in Oslo longer-term scenarios under which between five and 15% of China's international trade, mostly container traffic, could use the route by 2020. Whether that will include the 250,000 tonne iron ore bulk carriers that London Mining wants to use from Isua, will depend on Hammond.