China’s Evolving Energy Security Strategy

This article explores the ways in which China's energy security strategy has evolved over the past fifteen years. Energy security had become an urgent policy priority for Beijing by the mid-2000s due to China's rapidly increasing oil import dependency set against the backdrop of oil scarcity and rising oil prices. Rather than rely on purely market-based means to secure oil supply, China pursued a state-led or neomercantilist approach. Initially, the most notable and distinctive element of its oil neomercantilism was the overseas acquisition of oil assets by China's national oil companies (NOCs) under broad strategic direction from Beijing. However, increasingly over the past decade China's energy security strategy, while remaining neomercantilist in orientation, exhibits greater reliance on the market. Reasons for this shifting emphasis include the changing geopolitics and geoeconomics of the global oil industry, which moved to oversupply following the US shale oil revolution, along with transformations within the Chinese state under the leadership of President Xi Jinping.