China has developed sophisticated hedging strategies for managing the international petroleum market, maintaining a favorable energy mix, pursuing overseas equity oil production, building a state-owned tanker fleet and strategic petroleum reserve, establishing cross-border pipelines, and diversifying its energy resources and routes. Though it cannot be “secured,” China’s energy security can be “insured” by marrying government concern with commercial initiatives. This book identifies the interrelationship between security and profit that better describes China’s energy-security policy.

Should Chinese energy investments be excluded from the liberal economic system based on geopolitical assessments only? This book explores the potential regulatory control by the Chinese government over foreign energy investments to achieve their perceived strategic objectives. Host states in which Chinese energy companies make investments have increasingly opposed Chinese energy investments in their national security reviews, based on concerns that these investments have strategic objectives. The book analyses China's investment-related law, regulations, and energy policies to examine how overseas energy investment-making is governed. The book also explores the role of the Chinese government in energy investment promotion and protection. Uniquely, the examination of China's potential regulatory control provides an objective criterion, rather than geopolitical considerations, for host states to assess the nature of Chinese energy investments. The book helps readers to open the 'black box' of Chinese energy investments from a regulatory perspective. It is a useful resource for researchers as well as practising lawyers assisting their Chinese clients through national security reviews, or when trying to determine whether China's SOEs can bring cases before investor-state arbitration tribunals.

China’s recent climate-energy policy, an outcome of contemporary challenges, has generated conflict of interest amongst major stakeholders. Coupled with a boost in demand for oil, gas and coal, as well as a rapid growth in wind and solar power, it has not only affected domestic fossil fuel and renewable energy providers, but has also provoked a resource boom, affecting development pathways internationally. This book therefore seeks to examine the economic, social and ecological effects associated with China’s climate-energy policy. Assessing how the policy has been and will be formulated and implemented, it analyses the changing use of energy, CO2 emissions and GDP, as well as social and environmental impacts both domestically and internationally. It presents in-depth case studies on specific policies in China and on its resource exporting countries, such as Indonesia, Australia, Myanmar and Mongolia. At the same time, using quantitative data, it provides detailed input-output and applied computable general equilibrium analyses. Arguing that China has actively advanced its climate-energy policy to become a leader of global climate governance, it demonstrates that China ultimately relocates the cost of its climate-energy policy to resource exporting countries. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of energy, the environment and sustainability, as well as Chinese Studies and economics.

The remarkable performance of the Chinese economy in the last three decades has placed China at the centre of the world stage. In 1993, China became a net importer of energy, although it was not until the early 2000s that the world began to pay more attention to China’s energy needs and its potential impact on the world. With China’s energy search occurring within a hegemonic global structure dominated by the United States, the US watches with interest as China enhances its ties with energy-rich states. The book examines this triangular relationship and questions whether the US and China are in competition regarding access to the energy of a third state, within the context of a potential power transition. It includes case studies on China's energy relationship with countries such as Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Iran, Sudan and Venezuela and aims to understand the way a rising power interacts with the existing leading power and the possible outcome of this competition. The analytical framework employed helps the reader to understand not only the nature and pattern of triangles among US, China and the Resource Rich States under ‘resource diplomacy’, but also the salient features of US-China competition around the world. Making an impressive contribution to the literature in fields such as US-China relations, international relations, Chinese foreign policy and global energy geopolitics, this book will appeal to students and scholars of these subjects.

Comprehensively examines the role that litigation can play in galvanizing climate action in the Asia Pacific Region.

Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine administered an unprecedented shock to the European and global energy markets, triggering emergency interventions and market reforms to limit the impact of the crisis on energy prices and supply security. More fundamentally, the supply shock sparked a profound reappraisal of foreign supply and infrastructure dependencies (for example, on China), leading states to adopt new legal initiatives to strengthen the resilience of their clean energy supply chains. Energy geopolitics and supply security are now firmly back at the centre of global energy policy, and in this new geopolitical reality, we critically need to reassess the role of energy law in the creation - and avoidance - of dangerous energy dependencies. Using the 2022 energy crisis as core example, Energy Dependence and Supply Security offers a legal analysis of energy trade and investment as a tool of geopolitical power, an issue seldom considered outside of economic statecraft and energy geopolitics. Anatole Boute's timely analysis illustrates the paradox of energy law and security: legal instruments of energy security have helped create the supply and infrastructure dependencies that allowed for the weaponization of energy. The book examines the legal responses adopted by the European Union to the impact of the Russian energy shock, reflecting on strategies to avoid similar disruptions in the clean energy industry. In turn, it proposes innovative supply security reforms that would allow dependencies to be managed, while still preserving the international collaboration that is needed to accelerate the transition to clean, affordable, and secure energy systems.

Many thought China's rise would fundamentally remake the global order. Yet, much like other developing nations, the Chinese state now finds itself in a status quo characterized by free trade and American domination. Through a cutting-edge historical, sociological, and political analysis, Ho-fung Hung details the competing interests and economic realities that temper the dream of Chinese supremacy—forces that are stymieing growth throughout the global South. Hung focuses on four common misconceptions: that China could undermine orthodoxy by offering an alternative model of growth; that China is radically altering power relations between the East and the West; that China is capable of diminishing the global power of the United States; and that the Chinese economy would restore the world's wealth after the 2008 financial crisis. His work reveals how much China depends on the existing order and how the interests of the Chinese elites maintain these ties. Through its perpetuation of the dollar standard and its addiction to U.S. Treasury bonds, China remains bound to the terms of its own prosperity, and its economic practices of exploiting debt bubbles are destined to fail. Hung ultimately warns of a postmiracle China that will grow increasingly assertive in attitude while remaining constrained in capability.

Since the end of the Cold War, South Korea has taken on a greater role in global affairs. Ramon Pacheco Pardo provides a groundbreaking analysis of South Korea’s foreign policy from its transition to democracy in the late 1980s through the present day, arguing that the country’s approach to the world constitutes a grand strategy. This book examines the key factors and goals that shape South Korea’s long-term strategy, with analysis that brings together its diplomatic, military, economic, and soft-power components. Pacheco Pardo shows that South Korea’s fundamental aim has been to move beyond its past as a “shrimp among whales” and instead attain autonomy and freedom of action. He explores how South Korean leaders across parties and governments have pursued security, prosperity, and status. Pacheco Pardo tracks South Korea’s core relationships with North Korea, the United States, and China, and he details the country’s objectives and policies across East Asia, the Asia-Pacific region, and the rest of the world. Drawing on in-depth interviews with past and present policy makers, this book presents an analytical account of how South Korean strategy is made and practiced. It expertly lays out South Korea’s grand strategy and, more broadly, makes a compelling case that middle powers like South Korea can implement grand strategies.

This book explores China’s approach to the nuclear programs in Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea. A major power with access to nuclear technology, China has a significant impact on international nuclear weapons proliferation, but its attitude towards the spread of the bomb has been inconsistent. China’s mixed record raises a broader question: why, when and how do states support potential nuclear proliferators? This book develops a framework for analyzing such questions, by putting forth three factors that are likely to determine a state’s policy: (1) the risk of changes in the nuclear status or military doctrines of competitors; (2) the recipient’s status and strategic value; and (3) the extent of pressure from third parties to halt nuclear assistance. It then demonstrates how these factors help explain China’s policies towards Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea. Overall, the book finds that China has been a selective and strategic supporter of nuclear proliferators. While nuclear proliferation is a security challenge to China in some settings, in others, it wants to help its friends build the bomb. This book will be of much interest to students of international security, nuclear proliferation, Chinese foreign policy and International Relations in general.

China is home to half of the world's large dams and adds dozens more each year. The benefits are considerable: dams deliver hydropower, provide reliable irrigation water, protect people and farmland against flooding, and produce hydroelectricity in a nation with a seeimingly insatiable appetite for energy. As hydropower responds to a larger share of energy demand, dams may also help to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, welcome news in a country where air and water pollution have become dire and greenhouse gas emissions are the highest in the world. Yet the advantages of dams come at a high cost for river ecosystems and for the social and economic well-being of local people, who face displacement and farmland loss. This book examines the array of water-management decisions faced by Chinese leaders and their consequences for local communities. Focusing on the southwestern province of Yunnan—a major hub for hydropower development in China—which encompasses one of the world's most biodiverse temperate ecosystems and one of China's most ethnically and culturally rich regions, Bryan Tilt takes the reader from the halls of decision-making power in Beijing to Yunnan's rural villages. In the process, he examines the contrasting values of government agencies, hydropower corporations, NGOs, and local communities and explores how these values are linked to longstanding cultural norms about what is right, proper, and just. He also considers the various strategies these groups use to influence water-resource policy, including advocacy, petitioning, and public protest. Drawing on a decade of research, he offers his insights on whether the world's most populous nation will adopt greater transparency, increased scientific collaboration, and broader public participation as it continues to grow economically.