China became a net oil importer in the mid-1990s, and it is now one of the largest oil importers in the world. Chinese national oil companies have been implementing the “going-out strategy” globally, investing in oil resources in Canada, Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Russian Far East, the Middle East, and Latin America. Consequently, in response to this resource activism in search of energy security, there has been an outpouring of books on China's oil relations with the world. Most of these books have been written from either a Chinese or an American perspective.
This volume, by contrast, focuses on Asian contemporary oil and gas issues from a Southeast Asian perspective, which is relatively unusual. The author of this volume, Lim Tai Wei, chose to focus on the East Asian region, in particular Russia, Japan, and ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), countries that China cooperates and competes with in more complicated ways than elsewhere. The volume covers an array of contemporary issues, from domestic debates over energy and the environment to policy choices on fossil fuels versus alternative energy. A previous work by the author, Oil in China: From Self-Reliance to Internationalization (Hackensack, N.J.: World Scientific, 2009), studied the historical development of China's domestic oil industry.
The author is based in Singapore, a major refining center for East Asia and the third-largest refining center in the world, where these complex interactions in the East Asian region must be monitored in order to forecast refining demand. China began refining its crude oil in Singapore at the beginning of its economic reforms, or perhaps even earlier, when the Daqing oilfield came on line with an export pipeline that extended to Dalian and opened in 1974. Thus, key questions for the author include the following: as China globalizes its search for oil beyond the region, what impact will this have on East Asia, how will it affect China's regional agreements and rivalries, and what will China's future oil demand look like?
Chapter 6 is devoted to how Beijing managed domestic oil demand during the 2004 energy crisis, which it found to be especially acute, although one could argue that China has had an ongoing energy crisis since 1979 as economic reforms have continually expanded domestic demand. The author argues that Beijing has frequently created mini–energy crises when it has tried to control domestic oil demand by removing subsidies, which inevitably leads to social unrest.
China's energy relations with Northeast Asia have a different dynamic than those with Southeast Asia. Northeast Asian oil relations have been much more competitive, with highly politicized, geopolitical struggles. Chapter 2 recounts the extended and much publicized Sino-Japanese rivalry for the Russian East Siberian oil pipeline that concluded with Beijing signing a $25 billion loan for oil agreement with Moscow in 2009. Chapter 4 examines potential flashpoints in East Asia as China's search for oil brings it into maritime disputes with Japan in the East China Sea and with Vietnam in the South China Sea, disputes that frequently involve close encounters between the Chinese and Japanese navies. Chapter 5 studies China's energy relations with Japan and India, Asia's two other large net oil importers, as Beijing both competes and partners with them in a three-way race for energy security.
China's Southeast Asian energy relations are best understood through the lens of economic integration. Chapter 3 examines industrialization in China's Pan Pearl River Delta and how this influences oil relations in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). The GMS is a program for regional cooperation and integration supported by the Asian Development Bank and the United Nations Development Programme since 1992 that facilitates Chinese–Southeast Asian cooperation in several sectors, including energy. This chapter is one of the book's most distinctive contributions. The GMS illustrates how the Chinese economy is integrating with neighboring Southeast Asian countries, a relatively neglected topic in most volumes on Chinese oil relations.
The author employs methodological eclecticism, in some chapters utilizing realism to discuss geopolitical struggles for oil, while in other chapters drawing on commercial liberalism to explain energy cooperation. The volume concludes with an assessment of China's domestic energy conservation programs and alternative energy projects. China's success or failure in these projects will affect the entire East Asian regional environment.
It is the particularities of the book that are its strengths. This book should appeal to research institutes, commercial organizations, and university libraries with specialized collections on Asian energy.
