China’s Energy Strategy: The Impact on Beijing’s Maritime Policies ed. by Gabriel B. Collins, Andrew S. Erickson, Lyle J. Goldstein, and William S. Murray (review)

This volume is a compilation of many of the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute’s (CMSI) second annual conference titled Maritime Implications of China’s Energy Strategy (October 6–7 2006). The conference addressed the possible interconnection between China’s evolving energy strategy, its naval strategy, and the prospects of a Chinese national security strategy that could reach beyond offshore defense and even beyond Taiwan. It was also intended to open a debate about whether the People’s Republic of China (PRC) aspires to be a powerful regional player or to become a global power based on robust aerospace forces and a blue water fleet. Specifically, the conference focused on three questions: (1) What is China’s energy strategy? (2) What role might energy dependence play in China’s emerging naval modernization? (3) What are the implications of China’s energy strategy for maritime strategy? (p. xii).

China’s Energy Future and National Security Strategy (pp. 1–114)

This first of four parts gives us the necessary information to initiate the discussion about the PRC’s economic and military development and its implications on energy needs and policy accommodations. The authors begin this section by informing us that the Chinese leadership is concerned about energy issues. The growing dependence they imply may have negative consequences, placing constraints on operations or causing strategic vulnerabilities. China met 90 percent of its energy needs from domestic sources in 2006, primarily from coal (with the exception of the transportation sector, which depends on petroleum). However, China has been an oil importer since 1993, and its demand is expected to increase from the current level of 40 percent to 75–80 percent in 2020 (p. 2). Thus, China’s growing dependence on imported oil is so great that it cannot be solved just by building an oil reserve. This problem could influence Sino-U.S. relations in two ways: It could reinforce opinions in Beijing of those who reject a policy of violent confrontation with the United States, or it could press China to act desperately, as did Japan during the Second World War (pp. 9–10).

The fear of a disruption in the energy supply by a sector of the Chinese leadership comes from the fact that it would be physically easy for the U.S. Navy to impede Chinese seaborne oil imports in the Straits of Malacca and Lombok or the Strait of Macassar in Indonesia. However, could the U.S. Navy protect its own oil and gas supply, which equaled 27 percent of the world’s oil trade in 2006? (China’s accounted for less than 6 percent of the global oil trade in the same year.) Retaliatory measures from China in case of a U.S. blockade could boost the prices of oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG), not to mention insurance (ergo, transportation) costs to extraordinary levels (p. 14). Fortunately, the only casus belli in the Sino–U.S. relationship, the Taiwan issue, is receding quickly. In a war scenario, Iran and Sudan would try to continue sending oil to China. Common providers, such as Angola, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, could press the United States (by cutting off their sales) to end the conflict (p. 15).

The lack of naval military assets encourages China’s leadership to regard the military component as just one among many others in the planning of an energy strategy. In this sense, China seems relatively comfortable letting the U.S. Navy continue protecting the world’s energy suppliers and ensuring freedom of navigation in the following years. The Chinese leadership’s current strategy is to diversify its providers and its energy menu with LNG, coal...