(this photo was stolen from fellow FReeper, shellshocked)
Posted on 11/19/2004 7:34:07 PM PST by demlosers
China's insatiable demand for energy is prompting fears of financial and diplomatic collisions around the globe as it seeks reliable supplies of oil from as far away as Brazil and Sudan.
An intrusion into Japanese territorial waters by a Chinese nuclear submarine last week and a trade deal with Brazil are the latest apparently unconnected consequences of China's soaring economic growth.
The connection, however, lies in an order issued last year by President Hu Jintao to seek secure oil supplies abroad – preferably ones which could not be stopped by America in case of conflict over Taiwan.
The submarine incident was put down to a "technical error" by the Chinese government, which apologised to Japan.
But even before the incident the People's Daily, the government mouthpiece, had commented that competition over the East China Sea between the two countries was "only a prelude of the game between China and Japan in the arena of international energy".
The Brazil trade deal included funding for a joint oil-drilling and pipeline programme at a cost that experts said would add up to three times the cost of simply buying oil on the market.
The West, however, has paid little attention to these developments. For the United States and Europe are far more concerned with the even more sensitive issues of China's relations with "pariah states".
In September, China threatened to veto any move to impose sanctions on Sudan over the atrocities in Darfur. It has invested $3 billion in the African country's oil industry, which supplies it with seven per cent of its needs.
Then, this month, it said that it opposed moves to refer Iran's nuclear stand-off with the International Atomic Energy Agency to the United Nations Security Council.
A week before, China's second biggest state oil firm had signed a $70 billion deal for oilfield and natural gas development with Iran, which already supplies 13 per cent of China's needs.
China has its own reserves of oil and natural gas and once was a net oil exporter. But as its economy has expanded by an average of nine per cent per year for the last two decades, so has its demand for energy.
This year it overtook Japan as the world's second largest consumer of energy, behind the US.
Its projected demand, boosted by a huge rise in car ownership as well as the need to find alternatives to polluting coal for electricity generation, has contributed to the surge in the price of oil this year. Shortages are already leading to power cuts in the big cities.
Since President Hu ordered state-owned oil firms to "go abroad" to ensure supply, they have begun drilling for gas in the East China Sea, just west of the line that Japan regards as its border.
Japan protested, to no avail, that the project should be a joint one.
The two are also set to clash over Russia's oil wealth. China is furious that Japan has outbid it in their battle to determine the route of the pipeline that Russia intends to build to the Far East.
Japan favoured a route to the sea, enabling oil to be shipped to both Japan and China. China wanted an overland route through its own territory, which would give it ultimate control if hostilities broke out.
Increasingly, analysts are saying that China's efforts have gone beyond what is safe or even in its own interests.
Claude Mandil, the executive director of the International Energy Agency in Paris, said the reserves in the East China Sea were hardly worth the trouble.
"Nobody thinks that there will be a lot of oil and gas in this part of the world," he said.
"It may be a difficult political issue but I don't think the energy content is worthwhile."
Eurasia Group, a New York-based firm of political analysts, said its oil experts worked out that China was paying such an inflated price for its investment in Brazil that the cost for the oil it ended up with was three times the market price.
"If China's economy falters, which, in my view, appears increasingly likely, then commodity prices will plummet, and with them, the value of the assets that produce them," Jason Kindopp, Eurasia's lead China analyst, said.
"Beijing may end up in a early 1990s Japan situation, where it is forced to sell recently purchased overseas assets for a fraction of what it paid for them."
China's wider aggression to secure oil and gas was the greatest threat to its international standing in the next decade.
"Sudan is the primary example," he said.
"It marks the first time in recent years that China has promised to wield its veto power in the UN Security Council against a petition initiated by the United States and backed by France and Great Britain."
Walmart is indeeed a great retailer. You seem to have a problem with them, but they have lowered the cost of many items. \
China is not just sold in Walmart. Go to RadioShack, or BestBuy, go to any clothing chain, or hardware store. Check out the local furniture shop. What used to be made in NC, is now coming from Kaitung...
The average American makes twenty times what a Chinese does, and spends it the same way. First for a roof overhead, then food, then comes everything else. We have a lot more for everything else... and thanks to our needs, so do the Chinese, now... But, we have given them technology for free, and that is the biggest danger... Loral, et al, were FOB's, and Billary sold out our soul, and our secrets! We just pay for it, now and in the future!
We stopped the Japanese invasion into China. Read about Nanking. What the Japanese did to China was far and away much worse than anything we did.
We were allies in WWII with China and USSR. Russia is not our mortal enemy now, and if we remain vigilant, there's every hope we can pass through these choppy waters and eventually come to a denouement with China as well.
Meanwhile, it looks like time to push for a solar power satellite array to be built by an international consortium like the Alaska pipeline was.
My science sense tells me that hydrogen power cells are not the answer, and cold fusion is a dream unless Albiquerque blows up unexpectedly.
The heathen rage!
The global village is not a happy settled utopia. The pressure cooker is building and the steam valve is pitted.
Or Kipling's
As an aside: About 15 years ago, give or take a few, I walked into a big, local gun store. The salesperson tried to interest me in a Chinese made SKS that was brand new in cosmoline right out of a case of them. I said no, but asked him where he could get brand new unused ChiCom rifles. He said that the ChiCom army was selling their old weapons so they could modernize their weapons!
Another factoid: When I was in grade school in the 40s, Pennsylvania poured more steel that any country in the world. There was a steel plant in Homeshead, PA that was over a mile long which operated 24 hours/day. One of the sights was to watch a shift change. Now it is closed. I don't even know if the building exists.
Another factoid: You could drive over to Youngstown, Ohio and the Bessemer converters would light up the night sky - every night as they made steel. Now, I don't think that one is operating.
I think that the US should wake up sometime soon. I recall a saying I believe by the German statesman Bismark, "You can do anything with a bayonet but sit on it." How large is the ChiCom army today? Check and see who is operating the Panama Canal today.
Depolymerization is easier. So is cooking tar sands, and using the silicate sludge leftovers to produce high grade ceramics, in addition to the usable petrochemicals produced.
Ceramic itself has the potential to replace several metals and/or plastics in a variety of applications.
The last few paragraphs are the best. Change is coming.
Wasn't it Chan Kahecik's (spelling dubious, spell check didn't help, neither the dictionary.) government in charge in China when it was made a permenent member of the UN security council? If so, Taiwan should legally be the China that controls that power.
Maybe if we boycott Wal'Mart, China won't have such a great need for oil. Buy American or don't buy at all.
The benefit is that over a billion people in China get a chance to live a better life. That's what capitalism is all about.
Nuclear is the only rational and reasonable answer. The only problem is the well funded irrational, unreasonable worry warts and their never ending parade of mindless law suits and violent protests.
More green propaganda. How many times have the doomsayers said that the earth can't support so and so many billion people and been proven wrong each time? Human ingenuity and technology has served us well so far. I don't see any reason why this cannot be the case in the future.
Lordy, those people have an attitude!"'
China is much like the Arab world, a primitive backwater with a thin veneer of civilization, and a grudge for centuries of self-induced failure projected outward in classic narcissistic fashion.
Like Araby, the Chinese borrow pride from the shadow of grandeur from ages past, while living like medieval peasants in a 21st century world.
China has been more aggressive in its efforts at modernization but their crippling weakness is about half a billion essentially under-/unemployed people with no hope for sharing in the coastal urban speckles of prosperity.
They have a mag-lev train from the airport, but 50 million people who (literally) live in caves.
Thanks for the ping!
right on!
(this photo was stolen from fellow FReeper, shellshocked)
China needs a big dose of hyrdrogen energy dropped right on Beijing.
Hint: It's cold, white, and full of pine trees...and oil, platinum, gold, and uranium. And hardly anyone lives there...
Wow. As China abandons Mao, you embrace Lenin's argument.
China's standard of living has quadrupled in the last twenty years.
Who do you think an expanded consumer market will benefit in the long run?
(Hint--it's the most capitalist country on Earth...)
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