| For the most part,this work intends to break away from the conventional analytical methodology of geopolitics and redefine the concept of China’s national oil security by means of closely referencing Susan Strange’s theory of structural power.Under the new methodological framework which Strange provides,power is understood as four-dimensional,namely power as reflected in the security structure,the production structure,the credit structure and the knowledge structure.And it is precisely under these power structures that the developmental status of China’s oil sector since the 2012 18th National Congress and the effectiveness of a selection of the nation’s oil-and energy related policies are encapsulated and analyzed.The primary sources of literature for this work are threefold:first,literatures regarding methodology,including the theoretical works of Susan Strange(the chief among which is the groundbreaking States and Markets,also Robert Gilpin’s The Political Economy in International Relations etc.)in international political economy,relevant works in international relations,including Power and Restraint:A Shared Vision for the US-China Relationship authored by Richard Rosecrance etc.,and finally,works related to macro-economic theories(e.g.Economics by Paul Samuelson etc.).;second,a selection of reports which are used as the basis for the qualitative assessment of both oil statistics and the nature and attributes of structural power which the oil statistics represent.This selection chiefly includes the Annual Report on China’s Energy Development recently released(it is released this April,in fact)by the China Electric Power Planning&Engineering Institute,the 2018 Oil Information Review,which is the latest version of a brand of the International Energy Agency’s fixture publications,the BP World Energy Statistical Report 2018 released by British Petroleum,and a bundle of additional data which have been collected thanks to the courtesy and generosity in spirit of the IEA Online Database and several other oil statistics portals;and third,certain national policy documents and documents containing corporate strategies are also used.Among them,the most important might be The Twelfth Five-Year Plan for the Energy Sector and The Thirteenth Five-Year Plan for Oil Development,which have been put into effect by the State Council and the National Development and Reform Commission of China,and also the Corporate Responsibility Report 2018 of PetroChina.Meanwhile,the core aim of this work is to present a potentially viable scheme to achieve a certain "ideal state" in the oil sector,by means of statistical induction,summarization and well-guided speculation.Specifically,the aim is to prove that despite various supply-demand challenges in the short run,China might be able to achieve in the mid-and long run,at least to an extent,the clean(which befits the criterion of sustainable development),efficient(which is defined as the efficiency to convert primary natural resources to secondary ones,which in turn fits into the theoretical framework of the production power structure),abundant(which fits into the framework of the credit power structure),self-sufficient(which fits into the framework of the security power structure)and technologically self-reliant(which fits into the framework of the knowledge power structure)excavation and utilization of world petroleum.In other words,China might be able to achieve,at least to a certain extent,the "ideal state" of oil energy security as defined by referencing Susan Strange’s theory of the four-dimensional structural power.To put this in more specific terms,this "ideal state" in the Chinese oil sector denotes the point at which the sum of China’s oil structural power makes net zero,which in actuality,describes the state of full and convenient accessibility to a sufficient amount of crude oil which is either procured domestically,or procured from none-domestic sources which are unexceptionally under domestic capital control.In addition,all procured crude oil must be,extracted,refined and made into forms of useable oil products completely by domestically controlled capital,and the chain of abovementioned procedures,namely from procurement to refinement and chemical processing,must completely adopt domestically patented technologies.This definition can either be interpreted as an answer to the question "cui bono" which takes center stage of Susan Strange’s theoretical framework,or as an enrichment in connotation to the conventionally defined oil energy security(such as the definitions provided in Power and Restraint:A Shared Vision for US-China Relationship,authored,as above,by Richard Rosecrance,and After Hegemony:Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy by Robert Keohane)based upon the theory of relational power.Hopefully,in the none-geopolitical methodology as is laid out above,this work could give more validity to the argument that the degree to which China’s mid-and long term oil energy security and the national transition to the use of alternative energies could be accomplished and sustained hinges above all upon the degree to which national policies and corporate strategies related to the credit and knowledge structures(instead of the structures of security and production which are central to conventional geopolitical analyses)could be carried out.This recognition might ultimately lead us to rethink the relative importance of geopolitics in relevant studies,which might be significant lower than the general belief.As such,for otherwise geopolitics-oriented studies,the theoretical framework of structural power might be best used as a necessary form of foundational inspiration for concrete analytical directions. |
