Chapter 17
A Fight for Natural Resources: China Sets New Rules of the Game
China and the West are fighting for the access to and control over fuel and mineral resources around the world.
Changes in the Global Markets
Global markets of energy and mineral resources are undergoing far-reaching irreversible changes, and so are perceptions about the policies needed to provide their stable supply. Global demand is surging due to a dramatic increase of consumption by the fast-growing large emerging economies. Between 1980 and 2000, China’s energy consumption doubled, while its GDP quadrupled. Between 2002 and 2005, on the contrary, its energy consumption was growing faster than the GDP. The energy demand in the four years prior to 2006 increased more than in the previous quarter-century (Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations 2009).
On the supply side, uncertainties and destabilization risks are exacerbating due to rising political instability in exporting countries, periodical redirections of sales from external to domestic markets by leading suppliers (China itself has shown an example in this regard, cutting exports of rare metals—a key input for high-tech industries, while it accounts for 97 percent of their global supply; other examples include Indonesia’s petroleum and natural gas, Russia’s petroleum products and timber, and so on), and, to a certain extent, a depletion, in some major producing countries, of existing deposits in the absence of new ones whose discovery and ...
