WASHINGTON — Not quite an ally, not quite an adversary, China with its exploding appetite for energy is helping drive up world oil prices — and putting still more strain on its relationship with the United States.
The importance stretches far beyond the gas pump, although that is where Americans are left wondering what’s behind the run-up, why it can’t be stopped and who is to blame. China is just one factor.
Also at play are worries about future supplies and production disruptions in Africa or the Mideast.
Still, the “China factor” is big. By some estimates, car ownership in China is growing so fast, with the expansion of its middle class, that by 2030 its traffic will be seven times or more what it is today. China already is the world’s second-largest energy consumer, after the United States.
That explains why senior-level economic officials from Beijing and Washington are meeting in Annapolis, Md., this week to discuss a range of hot-button issues, including the $256.2 billion U.S. trade deficit with China — an all-time high — and prospects for increasing cooperation on energy issues.
Looming in the background of these and other discussions about U.S. competition with China is the prospect of armed conflict — if not over China’s demand for the return of Taiwan, then over energy resources. China has invested greatly in modernizing its military in recent years, although its budget — even by the Pentagon’s high-end estimate — is hardly one-quarter what the U.S. spends on defense.
At present, it sounds far- fetched to think of rising oil demand as a trigger for war with China, and some of the United States’ more experienced China-watchers say that makes little sense.
“Really, what it comes down to is not whether the last barrel of oil goes to them versus us, because there is always another barrel of oil — it just gets more expensive, just like gold or copper or what have you,” said Drew Thompson, the director of China Studies at the Nixon Center, a think tank.
In a sense, U.S. consumers have a stake in seeing China’s energy needs met. Americans can’t seem to get enough of China’s exports, from toys and clothes to computers and car parts. That’s an expanding appetite that is part of the reason China is looking far and wide for additions to its energy supplies.
“So long as we’re buying Chinese goods to our own benefit, much of the Chinese international raw-material purchases are there to serve us,” Thompson said. “That’s a political realization I don’t think we’ve yet made.”
