China's New Energy-Security Debate

China Quarterly, 2004

China's shift to a net oil importer has generated much speculation outside China about how China's growing dependence on foreign oil will affect its international behaviour. This discussion is framed by two competing models of China's future approach to energy security: one that foresees deeper integration into global energy markets and another that predicts efforts to minimize reliance on these markets in potentially destabilizing ways. Less attention has been paid, however, to the parallel debate unfolding inside China over how to ensure the country's oil needs are met without undermining national security. This article introduces the main participants in the debate, how the debate relates to energy security decision-making, and some of the measures to enhance energy security under consideration. It concludes with a discussion of some of the factors that will shape China's emerging approach to energy security.

Energy Policy, 2011

China, now the world's second-largest economy, is worried about energy security, which underpins the core objectives of Beijing and the political legitimacy of the Communist Party of China. The purpose of this study is to explore certain popular myths about China's energy security. The study consists of six parts. After the introduction, it formulates the obscure concept of ''energy security'' and attempts to contextualize it with ''Chinese characteristics.'' Then it explicitly points out that the largest driver of oil demand by China as the ''World's Factory'' is transport instead of industry. Next, it explores the effectiveness of transnational pipelines as a measure of energy security and explains why they are less effective than many observers have previously assumed. Furthermore, it investigates the global expansion of Chinese national oil companies and questions their actual contribution to energy security. A few concluding remarks then follow.

As the world's largest energy consumer today, China's economic growth has been largely driven by surging energy consumption. To examine the nexus of energy and China's national security becomes an urgent task for both scholars and policy makers in the country. Over the last decade, China has adopted an energy security approach emphasizing its external energy supply, which is quite similar to the Western approach. However, as the largest energy producer in the world, China only needs to import a small percentage of primary energy to meet the demand. Its energy mix is also in sharp contrast with that of Industrialized Western countries' (IWCs), especially when we realize that coal consumption constantly accounts for about 70 percent of China primary energy mix, and oil less than 20 percent. This is largely due to Chinese industrial sector's significant contribution to its GDP and its increasing demand for coal-based electric power, China's energy-economy nexus is therefore profoundly different with that of the IWCs at this stage. Therefore, it is argued that, over the last decade, both the Chinese scholars and policy makers have not developed and employed an energy security approach reflecting its actual energy vulnerabilities and to cope with the urgent energy security threats the country faces. For a developing economy like China, a broader energy security approach should be developed to guide the scholarly research and policy making in the future.

China has in recent years risen to the top of the list of energy importing nations. Sometime in the past decade it overtook the United States as the world’s largest consumer of imported energy (IEA, 2014). The dramatic increase of China’s share in international energy markets has prompted the government in Beijing to prioritise relations with external suppliers. These include some of China’s closes neighbours as well as countries geographically remote from China. The country’s rapid economic growth and securing the means to fuel this growth have come to dominate Beijing’s thinking on foreign policy. China’s external relations increasingly prioritise making overseas investments in new sources of imported energy. As a result, its energy security and foreign relations have become inextricably intertwined. This special issue contains several scholarly works that explore the modalities of China’s energy security strategy and its impact on the country’s commercial relations with the rest of the world. Contributions assess the environmental implications of this strategy and discuss what it tells us about China as an international actor. The approach to energy security, geopolitics and the environment taken in this special issue is interdisciplinary. The articles presented here draw on approaches and methodologies from the disciplines of economics, management, political ecology, area studies and international relations to study China’s energy diplomacy and its international impact. Contributions cover a range of energy sources, from petroleum and natural gas to solar, hydropower and other renewables.

2014

The scale of China’s energy import requirement, along with the short-term unpredictability of the scale of these imports in the cases of oil and coal, has made China a significant player in energy international trade. This has affected not only international prices for energy products, but also the direction of energy flows. The concomitant expansion of international investment and service provision by its national oil companies and of diplomatic initiatives by the government has drawn China into almost every major oil and gas province around the world. The aim of this chapter is to examine China’s current and future energy needs and the strategies the government and enterprises are pursuing in order to enhance the national security of energy supply.

Defense & Security Analysis, 2003

The article explores the energy security concerns faced by China from the point of view of energy users working in government, university, civil society and business sectors. The authors first derive a set of seven hypotheses related to Chinese energy security drawn from a review of the recent academic literature. We then explain each of these seven hypotheses, relating to (1) security of energy supply, (2) geo-politics, (3) climate change, (4) decentralization, (5) energy efficiency, (6) research and innovation of new energy technologies, and (7) self sufficiency and trade. Lastly, the article tests these hypotheses through a survey distributed in English and Mandarin completed by 312 Chinese participants. The conclusion presents insights for policymakers and energy scholars.

China perpectives, 2011

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Asian Perspective, 2018

Since the early 2000s, energy security has appeared frequently in Chinese policy statements. The focus is on security of supply, even if the discourse is becoming more attentive to other dimen sions, such as environmental sustainability. Securitization theory can shed light on this specific threat construction and its implica tions for China and Chinese foreign policy. Applying securitiza tion theory and reviewing existing debates, I show how the con struction of an external threat and a focus on securing access to oil downplay other vulnerabilities and contribute to the percep tion among China's neighbors and others of a Chinese threat, despite new Chinese security discourses to the contrary. I argue that two factors contribute to this threat construction and its resilience: the role of national oil companies and the limited mobi lizing power of environmental and climate security discourses.