By Simone McCarthy, CNN
Beijing (CNN) — For more than a decade, leader Xi Jinping has overseen a transformation within the Chinese economy with one aim: making it energy-secure.
Under that vision, China has unleashed a renewable energy revolution of wind, solar and hydropower, drilled ever deeper into oilfields offshore and on, and forged pacts with partners for more supply – all in a bid to cut the country’s reliance on imported fuel and insulate it against “external shocks.”
Now, the historic oil crisis triggered by the United States and Israel’s war on Iran is posing the sternest test to date of China’s Promethean effort toward energy self-sufficiency. It’s a test that China appears to be passing.
While fuel-strapped countries across Asia have scrambled for supplies, China – the world’s largest energy importer – has been sitting on vast stockpiles of oil, an industrial sector largely run on domestic energy and a fleet of cars increasingly powered by electricity, not gas.
For China, the ability to weather the energy shocks from the weeks-long war “is sort of a vindication of everything they’ve done to enhance energy security,” said Erica Downs, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
“There’s a lot they can look back on and say, ‘We made the right call.’”
That vindication for China comes at a time when the US has retreated from its push into renewable energy and electric vehicles – creating a steep divergence between the models of the world’s two leading economies when it comes to power.
Electrostate
Since becoming a net importer of energy in the early 1990s, China has seen its reliance on the Middle East as a dangerous vulnerability.
Its leaders have eyed the narrow waterways like the Strait of Malacca through which this fuel flows as potential chokepoints if a future adversary wanted to strangle Beijing’s supply.
To reduce reliance on maritime routes, China has over recent decades built costly pipelines funnelling oil and gas over land from Central Asia, Russia and Myanmar. It’s also diversified its sources, with Russia catapulting to the top of China’s list of oil suppliers in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
But while his predecessors focused on expanding China’s sources of oil and gas, Xi has also aimed to reduce China’s reliance on the outside world altogether.
China must “adhere to worst-case-scenario thinking,” Xi’s adage goes, often repeated as he steels his cadres to prioritize national security in the face of what he sees as an increasingly hostile and volatile world.
Under Xi, Beijing ramped up a nascent push to both increase green energy and reduce reliance on fossil fuels, unleashing more government backing for renewable energy and EVs.
Now, sprawling solar and wind farms are being installed at breakneck pace across China’s plateaued hinterlands and along its coastlines. Domestic factories have cracked the code on making cheap batteries for electric cars, which are fast replacing gas-guzzlers on China’s highways. It helps that China dominates supply chains for materials needed to make these goods.
And the picture is diverse. In a country already running a third of global hydropower capacity, ambitious dam projects are breaking ground in China’s mountainous west, while the government has set its sights on pioneering next-generation technologies like nuclear fusion and green hydrogen.
Meanwhile, rich coal deposits stretched across northern Chinese provinces continue to feed power plants and backstop renewable supply, in a reminder that China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, has yet to kick its fossil fuel habit.
And even as China is running much of its industry on electricity