imports. “Certain powers have all along encroached on and tried to control navigation through the strait,” Hu is said to have declared. “Certain powers” was an obvious euphemism for the United States.2
The growing attention to risk was reinforced by what happened in 2004: the unanticipated jump in both Chinese and global demand for oil and the consequent rapidly rising prices. An energy problem had already become evident in China from late 2002. But initially it was a coal and electricity problem, not an oil problem. China depends on coal for 70 percent of its total energy and about 80 percent of its electricity. The economy was growing so fast that tight supplies of coal turned into outright shortages. At the same time, electric power plants and the transmission network could not keep up with the demand for power. The country simply ran out of electricity. As brownouts and blackouts hit most of the provinces, a sense of crisis gripped the country. Factories were working half days or even shutting down because of shortages of energy, while sales of diesel generators soared as desperate industrial enterprises resorted to making their own electricity. Power was so short in some parts of the country that traffic lights weren’t working, and children were back to doing their homework by candlelight. Hotels in Beijing were requested to keep room thermostats above 79 degrees Fahrenheit, and their staffs ordered to use the stairs rather than the elevators.3
Only one short-term alternative to coal was available for satisfying the accelerating energy demand—oil. That is why China’s oil demand in 2004 grew not by the anticipated 7 or 8 percent but that much higher 16 percent, requiring a rapid rise in petroleum imports. The Chinese oil companies hurriedly stepped up their efforts both to increase domestic production and to access additional supplies internationally.
Around this time, the theses about peak oil and limitations on future supply were permeating discussions in Beijing, as elsewhere in the world. The overlay of a fear of imminent and permanent shortage, which was so common in this period, added to a pervasive sense of crisis about the adequacy and availability of future supplies and whether a new rivalry would emerge.
PETRO-RIVALRY?
But what would a “new-energy-security strategy” look like? This became part of what has become a continuing debate about the possibility of a petro-rivalry between the United States and China. Some strategists in Beijing worry about China’s depending on a world oil market that they assert is unreliable, rigged against them, and in which the United States has, in their view, excessive influence. Some of them even argue that the United States has a strategy to interdict sea-borne Chinese oil imports—cut off China’s overseas “oil lifeline”—in the event of a confrontation over what has been for decades the most critical issue between the two nations, the self-governing island of Taiwan and its relationship to mainland China. They criticize the presence of the U.S. Navy in the regional seas and U.S. support for Taiwan—even as economic links between Taiwan and the People’s Republic continue to grow. Some of the military leaders denounce the United States, in the words of one admiral, as a “hegemon.”
The reverse of such fears can be found among some strategists in the United States. There are those who argue that China, driven by a voracious appetite for resources and control, has a grand strategy to project its dominance over Asia while also seeking to preempt substantial world oil supplies. China is said to be pursuing this strategy with a single-minded mercantilism, backed up by growing military power. They point, for evidence, to double-digit increases in Chinese defense spending, a rapid naval buildup, China’s pursuit of naval and aviation technology, and its potential for developing a “blue water navy” that would project naval power far beyond China’s neighborhood. Moreover, China has established a network of strategic ports, bases, and listening posts along the Indian Ocean. These critics specifically cite the development of new missiles that seem aimed directly at U.S. sea power—specifically aircraft carriers—and at upsetting the security of sea-lanes that U.S. sea power protects—security from which China, as much as any nation, directly benefits.
All this could stir up the specter of a naval arms race reminiscent of the Anglo-German naval race that did so much to inflame the tensions that ignited the First World War. Despite an extensive and growing economic relationship in the years that led up to August 1914, Britain and Germany were driven apart by rivalry and the suspicions aroused