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Now let's look at some key actors outside of the government.
And first we'll look at the companies and their interests.
Now, overall I think people still feel that this companies are driven by profit.
They want to make money, the chief executives want to be able to
show that they are doing a good job and competing effectively
with international oil companies in these energy rich states.
Yet because they get their funding from the national government,
many people saw them in the early days as often overpaying for
projects because they had to get in.
They were a latecomer to the oil game and they really needed to get in and so
people said they were overpaying.
They were also seen to be less competitive than many of the IOCs
because they were relying that they have this government money.
Also their aggressive efforts to buy resources worldwide with limited
coordination has created a great deal of anxiety for much of the world.
At one point, 90 Chinese companies we're waiting for
approval from the four investment review board in Australia.
And this lead the Australian government to introduce new laws to review SOE
investment and money of those loss were actually will see what targeted at China.
And because there's state on enterprises people overseas see them as an arm of
the Chinese state.
And in fact, the CEOs of the major oil companies are appointed by the Communist
party, and our members of the central committee of the Communist party.
Making them among the 200 most powerful people in the Chinese Communist Party.
Now there are dissensions from that view.
Some people would argue that in fact, the tail is actually wagging the dog.
That the companies are actually pushing the government, and
there are Chinese observers like Zha Daojiong.
Who see the national oil companies as asking the government to help them compete
with the IOCs rather than the government pushing the oil firms to go overseas.
So we can quote Zha here, difficult to ascertain whether a particular
oil gas venture overseas is the result of the Chinese government
dictating its state owned energy company to carry out a governmental mission.
Or the domestic energy industry seeking diplomatic assistance from the government.
Because as the late comers they actually found themselves at quite
a disadvantage to big companies like Esso and Shell and BP.
And in 2006 Ma and Andrew Speed, Ma was his student,
saw only limited encouragement from the Chinese government for
expansion of the national oil companies.
And while they saw close government link in the late 1990s.
They said that since 2002, the link has loosened perceptively in most
cases there is little evidence to suggest that the government is doing
anything other than support an initiative led by the national oil companies,
develops associated economic activities and provide a coordinated role.
And there's the quotations come from those two articles that I met they
recited there.
Think tanks have actually been very much involved in these kinds
of analysis and discussions.
Back in 2003 and 2004, we found that there had
been four conferences by the Chinese think tanks.
One in particular by the Chinese Institute of International Studies,
under the foreign ministry.
And it was attended by military, business, government,
academics and all of them laid out a strategy for China's central leaders.
And the report that they published in 2003 by 73 officials and
executives from three oil companies emphasize three major points.
First, that China's energy security faced an unfavorable shift so this is 2003.
Just around the time that the Navy starts pushing its point.
West, particularly US could contain China's efforts
to exploit overseas oil and gas resources.
Here, thinking that the western companies could make life difficult, and
the US military.
And on prices, violent fluctuations of oil prices and
energy supply could effect China's energy security.
And so actually, they were quite prescient for a period of time,
we saw oil prices shoot way up to about $150 a barrel.
And now they went way down, so it has been huge fluctuations.
Now, Chinese analysts also highlight, this one particular article we found,
really highlighted some of these insecurities.
And this gentleman named Dou Chao,
he argued that Central Asian countries could not resist the US.
And then once more colored revolutions, once more of the authoritarian
regimes in Central Asia were toppled and replaced by pro US parties
that China would have a tougher time importing oil from these countries.
Assuming then that the United States would tell these countries not to
supply oil to China.
In 2004, again Dou argued that the US designed what
was called the Regional Maritime Security Initiative.
And here they tried to send troops into the Straits of Malacca
in the name of counter terrorism.
But Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and China prevented it.
But he still sees the US trying to use Singapore as an important entree
for the US into the Straits of Malacca.
It also sees the US army in airbases in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan,
those countries of Central Asia really threatening China's oil pipeline.
Now, one last quote that I put up here really comes from a Senior Fellow at
the China Institute of International Studies in the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs.
Where he says, when a country the size of China imports more than 50
million tons of oil, fluctuations in the international oil market have
considerable impact on the national economic operations of that country.
China's oil imports began to exceed 50 million tons as early as 2000.
And since then China has been exposed to potential risks of oil supply disruption.
So this people are very nervous about China's energy security.
So I would get you to stop and think.
7:19
Who are the key players in China's resource diplomacy and
do they have conflicting interests or do they all share a common interest.
One last group that I just want to briefly discuss,
largely because I did research on them and I did a survey back in
2006 about 800 students in universities all around China.
And we asked a series of questions about their views on China's energy situation.
We published it,
I published it with one of my students in a journal that's cited down here.
And we asked a series of questions, but I'll just show you two of those questions.
One was, how concerned are you about energy and
the energy crisis or China's energy problems.
And you can see that in fact back in 2006, Chinese students were quite concerned.
And as many as almost 25% of them really believed that it was a crisis.
Now having had those concerns,
what did they think about China becoming a dependent nation?
And we've spent a fair amount of time, I've spent a fair amount of time talking
about dependency on different states and this anxiety.
And they actually believed, though there's a fair number here.
Here's the total numbers who voted or gave answer to our survey.
Here you can see that a significant percentage of them
were neither worried nor not so worried.
But still over here, you can see that many of these students
actually believed that it was completely possible for
China to become a independent state, because of its energy needs.
David ZweigChair Professor of the Division of Social Science and Director of Center on China’s Transnational Relations
