Middle East Oil In The 21st Century, China's Oil Security,

It is an indisputable fact that ever since China became a net importer of oil in 1993 the issue of China's oil security has grown increasingly apparent and noticeable. As a result, the Middle East, a physically remote region from China prior to 1990s has seemed all of a sudden not so far away from the country. Despite the fact that Central Asian countries and Russia will be able to provide China with certain amount of oil, yet over a certain period of time and taken as a whole, China will derive most of its oil supplies from the Middle Eastern region. It is in this sense that the issue of China's future oil security is practically an issue of oil conditioned upon the Middle East as well as an important international issue closely related to it. Nevertheless, as China is restrained by a wide variety of factors, by far it has still adopted a policy of "standing aloof from the Middle East affairs and has not worked out a systematic security strategy for oil supplies from the Middle East. This is clearly unfavorable to China's oil security. Therefore, a research on oil in the Middle East and China's oil security is of urgent and realistic strategic importance.By employing a method of combining narration with argumentation, logical inference with comparative analysis and qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis, by taking the standpoint of historical materialism and based on interdisciplinary application of such economic principles as comparative cost theory and international relation theories, the present paper intends to make a breakthrough in the traditional theoretical framework of oil security and probe into the issue of oil in the Middle East and China's oil security in some way.The whole paper falls into four chapters, totalling some 120,000 characters and with a structure and framework organized as follows:Chapter 1, entitled Oil in the Middle East and global geopolitics of oil and natural gas. Section 1 deals with the general world situation of oil and competition of oil resources. Although there have always been a dispute between two different kinds of views regarding the general world situation of oil, namely, the theory of oil crisis andthe theory of scientific progress, yet after analysing them carefully, the author of the current paper tends to accept the former theory. Based on this and on the bell curve theory by King Hubert, it can be reasoned that in the coming 20 years the general world situation of oil will essentially remain balanced. From that time onward, with the increase of world oil consumption quicker than that of world oil production, the global oil market will gradually tend to be in short supply. With the steady growth of natural gas, the recent hot spot of world sources of energy and with the encouraging progress in such renewable sources of energy as solar energy and wind energy, the proportion of oil in the world's unrenewable sources of energy has indeed been lower than before; nevertheless, upon comparing with natural gas, nuclear energy and other sources of energy, it has been found out that the dominance of oil in the world's unrenewable sources of energy will remain unshakable in the coming 20 years though after that period of time there may be intense competition between oil and natural gas for supremacy. Although people have been repeatedly made a fool of by the unpredictable oil price and made one misjudgement about it after another, yet given the world general situation of oil supply and demand, the essential variable, with which the oil price will continue to vary, plus other factors, such as the oil price policy of some Middle Eastern oil producers which is tending more and more rational, it can be roughly concluded that the world oil price will be stable with a slight rise. On the other hand, because of the nature of world oil market and four other major factors which have recently aggrevagated the turbulence of the world oil market, oil price will stay shaky and unstable as before over a period of time to come. In addition, the concentrated tendency...