Energy Geo-political Situation Of China's Strategic

As an essential material basis for human life and production, energy has played an important role in the history of human development. Energy issues are not limited to economic field. The impact of energy on international politics has long been attracting great attention from the international studies scholars, especially the geopoliticians. Since the date of birth of geopolitics, strategic regions with rich energy reserve have become the focus of the geopolitical study and the crucial points of geopolitical struggling.In the 1970s, as the oil crisis broke out, the issues concerning energy have increasingly drawn geopoliticians'concern. Besides the sea, land, and sky (space), energy has formally become the fourth dimension of geopolitical research. Because energy resources are limited and non-renewable, all the countries around the world have to face the threat of exhaustion of energy resources in future. Therefore, the geopolitics of energy not only shares the realistic and confrontational traits of the traditional geopolitics, but also bears some new features, such as cooperative nature. The contemporary world map of energy geopolitics consists of the heart zone of energy resources, inner demand crescent zone, outer demand zone and the strategic hinge countries of energy that link all the countries in the above mentioned zones. On the map, China plays the role of the hinge country of energy, connecting the heart zone of energy resource and the East Asia energy consumption market. However, China's status as a hinge country of energy has been challenged in various aspects, for example, the oil and gas production capacity and transportation direction of the Caspian Sea in Central Asia, especially in Kazakhstan, the competition between China and Russia on energy supply line in Far East, the issue of "Asian premium" on oil price, and the Malacca dilemma. Therefore, it bears important theoretical and practical significance to study how the energy geopolitics pattern affects the rise of great powers, and how energy influences and shapes the international political system, and to analyze and interpret China's status and its strategy on the evolution of energy geopolitics pattern in future.In this essay, the geopolitical theory is the starting point of the research and the framework of the analysis. This essay examines the evolution of the world geopolitics of energy by using the methods of theoretical and empirical analyses. Moreover, it investigates the China's status in the evolution of the contemporary geopolitics of energy pattern and its corresponding countermeasures from the realistic perspective.