China Attempting to Secure It's Access to Oil

From the National Interest:

In recent weeks, China has signed nearly $100 billion in energy contracts to increase Chinese access to the abundant petroleum resources of Central Asia. A major advantage of obtaining oil from Siberia and Central Asia is that it could travel to China overland—and thus beyond the reach of U.S. naval power.
Xi’s efforts are not limited to terra firma. He has also pressed for closer military and economic ties with Indonesia and Malaysia, the two countries which sit astride the Strait of Malacca, a crucial maritime “choke point.” Roughly 80 percent of China’s oil imports pass through this waterway, which is just two miles wide at its narrowest passage. By comparison, the oft-threatened Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has periodically promised to close to deny Persian Gulf oil to the global market, is twenty miles wide at its narrowest point.

An American naval blockade, most likely stemming from a conflict over Taiwan, is a nightmare scenario the Chinese regime clearly wishes to avoid. ...

Most observers believe China’s investment reflects the importance of petroleum access for sustaining the nation’s extraordinary economic growth ...


No doubt oil plays an important role in the Chinese economy, and by extension, the stability of its political regime. Yet this explanation overlooks a factor that is at least as important as prosperity: the crucial nature of oil for fighting modern wars.



In the past, military fuel shortages had disastrous effects on the battlefield, undermining both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan’s military efforts in World War II. Today’s conventional wisdom holds that such shortages are no longer a danger, based on the assumption that military oil consumption comprises only a tiny portion of a country’s overall petroleum demand. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I find that Chinese military fuel demand in a conventional conflict would be staggering—large enough, in fact, to strain its overall supplies. ... If a U.S. blockade cutting off oil imports coincided with a war against Taiwan, leaving China to fuel the war from domestic sources alone, China would eventually have to slash civilian aviation consumption by 75 percent to maintain a full military effort.

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