Posted on 02/18/2014 4:51:37 AM PST by thackney
...I talked to the two authors by phone this week about China's "resource quest." A lightly edited transcript follows.
Brad Plumer: There have been countless books written about China’s rise. Why focus on the country's appetite for raw materials?
Elizabeth Economy: The rise of China is one of the great transformative processes of our time. And yet we still don’t have that great an understanding of the implications of that rise, either for governance or for international security or for the global economy. So we wanted to use this resource quest — to look at where China’s going abroad to get the resources to fuel its economy — to get at this question of what the rise of China means to the world.
BP: At one point you note that China's current rise actually has a lot of parallels to the rapid growth of Japan in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then Japan used about 9 percent of the world's oil. Today China uses roughly 11 percent. And Japan didn't fundamentally upend the global economic system. Does that suggest that China’s rise here isn’t totally unprecedented? Michael Levi: That’s a fair suggestion. What the history tells us is that the emergence of a massive new consumer of resources — and a huge new investor in resources — that does things a bit differently from everyone else isn't destined to fundamentally change the international economic and political system.
What history doesn’t tell us is whether China will turn out more like Japan did or whether China will turn out differently. But at a minimum, it helps to clear the field and allow people to open their minds to the possibility that things can turn out in a broad variety of ways.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
There are lots of raw materials in Afghanistan. Let the Chinese have it. Necessity is the mother of invention and if they have a billion people to feed whats wrong with a few million troops stationed in that hellhole? They can have it.
Very interesting article.
Last I heard raw materials prices were falling. I think the reason for that is that the Chinese overbought a couple years ago and this year their economy may be slowing down a bit.
but yeah, the chinese figure that when they bring their whole country into the middle class in the way that taiwan has done, their demand for oil will be many times larger than it is today.
That’s part of what’s driving tensions in the south china sea and the east china sea. its thought that there’s lot of oil and gas under those waters.
imho chinese demand for oil and that of a host of other countries will keep the price of oil high for at least until 2020 & maybe to 2030. (you’ve seen the shell graphs)but the high cost of oil invites competitors in the form of natural gas trucks and buses and electric cars. sales of both are rising fast but off small bases. high oil prices will encourage them to grow at high rates under the radar. at some point they have to blunt demand. In 2020 tesla hopes to be selling 500000 cars which is still a drop in the bucket of worldwide demand for cars. But if Tesla sells that many cars, all the major electric car makers will be doing similar numbers. We’re talking maybe 2 million cars. Still demand for oil is so strong world wide, all I think this does is keep the price of oil from going sky high.
here is the bearish case for the chinese economy near term.
U seem very knowledgeable and intelligent. However, this site is more about violence in the Amish community as well as teachers having sex with their students.
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