In the not too distant past China was often referred to as a sleeping giant. It has long been the country with the largest population and the third largest land area. But with an under developed economy it did not wield a proportionate amount of influence and impact on the global stage. That has been changing over the past 25 years. The rate of that change has been staggering and despite periodic predictions of a bubble about to burst the process continues to proceed with no significant interruption. China's energy consumption and the global quest for more of it is creating major economic and geopolitical waves.
China’s Global Search for Energy
Whether by diplomacy, investment or in extreme cases, force, China is going to great lengths to satisfy its growing hunger for energy to fuel its expanding car fleet and electrify its swelling cities.
The Chinese government showed that desire on Wednesday when it reached a 30-year natural gas deal with Russia, even as China was locked in a tense standoff with Vietnam over a Chinese oil rig drilling in the contested South China Sea.
The two events involve different political dynamics. The agreement with Russia reflects closer economic ties between the two nations, while the other underscores the growing tension of two on-again, off-again Cold War allies.
But both developments demonstrate China’s expansive approach to energy, a political and economic strategy with significant implications for the rest of the world. As its economy has rapidly expanded over the last decade, China’s energy efforts have come to dominate the global markets. Its mushrooming consumption helped prompt the spike in global oil prices in the mid-2000s.
China is projected to pass the US to become the world's largest economy as measures by purchasing power parity sometime this year. What hasn't been particularly noted is that they passed the US as the world's largest consumer of energy about four years ago.
While China is making a concerted effort to develop additional domestic energy resources such as shale gas, there is no prospect that such sources will be able to meet the expanding demand. Their search for energy sources and other forms of raw materials has led to the establishment of extensive global economic relationships in Latin America and Africa. So far those have generally been more focused on economic objectives rather than any attempt to influence and control the politics of other countries. This sets them apart from the usual approach of US foreign relations. However, money and politics have a way of eventually becoming intertwined.
The economic and political competition between the US and China is clearly heating up. One of the purposes of the controversial Trans Pacific Partnership seems to be an attempt the build a ring fence around China. The US is making military alliances with China's neighbors who are engaged in various territorial disputes. Now the there is growing drama on the cyber war front with the US and China accusing each other of criminal hacking conspiracies.