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China and America in the Persian Gulf
China and the American Quest for Hegemony in the Persian Gulf
New and important energy interests entered China’s diplomatic calculus in
the 1990s. When China opened in 1978, it imported little crude oil and was
itself a modest supplier of that product. In the late 1970s, estimates of huge
deposits of offshore oil in the Bohai Gulf led to exaggerated projections that
China would become a major oil exporter. These projections underlay a short-
lived post-Mao but neo-Maoist approach to China’s foreign orientation under
Hua Guofeng’s leadership before Deng’s takeover in late 1978. But as China
developed under Deng’s policy of opening, its demand for oil rose rapidly.
Most electricity was still produced by burning coal, but internal combustion–
driven mobility (cars, trucks, airplanes, ships, diesel locomotives) required
oil-based fuels, while petrochemical factories required petroleum feed stocks.
China’s domestic oil production simply could not keep pace with skyrocket-
ing demand. Oil imports grew. In 1993, China’s oil consumption surpassed
domestic production. This growing dependency on imported petroleum made
China vulnerable to disruption in international oil supplies. This brought the
Persian Gulf into focus, since the producers of that region—Saudi Arabia,
Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman—are among the world’s
leading suppliers of oil.
But the Persian Gulf was also a region of war and revolution—instabil-
ity that could disrupt oil supplies. It was also a region under US domina-
tion, and this reality made China’s vital oil supply vulnerable to US pressure.
Consequently, China tried mightily throughout the 1990s and 2000s to
diversity its foreign oil supplies away from the Persian Gulf. It achieved some
success in this. Angola and Sudan, the Central Asian republics, and Russia
emerged as major suppliers. But after decades of attempting to diversify away
from the Persian Gulf, that region’s producers still supplied about the same
share, some 50 percent, that they had decades earlier. The simple geological