Energy Security in China: Beyond Traditional Approach (original) (raw)

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.