Full Presentation: Gabriel Collins, “China Mobilizes Its Energy Sector For Great Power Competition and Global Disorder,” https://collinsresearchportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Collins_China-Mobilizes-Its-Energy-Sector-For-Great-Power-Competition-and-Global-Disorder_October-2025.pdf
Energy involves both the physical world of heat, flame, splitting atoms, and spinning turbines as well as the more ethereal—but incredibly powerful—world of globalized markets. It also presents unique analytical opportunities. Strategists studying war and long-term strategic competition rarely receive real-time feedback from the world around them (apart from wars like those underway in Ukraine or Israel). Episodic events force a heavy reliance on backcasting and parsing the past for clues about the present. Hence, the use of the time-worn adage that “generals always fight the last war.”
Energy is very different because energy “war” is being fought constantly in real time as companies, consumers, and countries iteratively prepare for the “next” campaign. Energy activities are also harder to hide than military ones due to their sheer scale and distinct signatures.
Even when Beijing seeks to conceal activities, they often reveal themselves through flows of physical goods, capital investments, and various emissions such as heat, methane, carbon dioxide, oil tank roofs, coal piles, dams, nuclear reactors, wind turbine and solar farms, and land-use changes that can be tracked by satellite. Words matter but actions speak far louder.
Energy security is national security. Energy drives economic competitiveness (and by extension, national power) and, at the most basic level, underpins modern civilization. We need it to cool off and stay warm, access clean water, remove and treat sewage, or bring essential foods and other items from producers to consumers. This is especially true for China, where basic, energy-intensive industries remain systemically important economic engines and the national energy system is now about 1.6 times the size of that of the United States, the planet’s second-largest consumer (see Figure 2).
Scholarly writings and lived action also suggest that Chinese policymakers think differently about energy and its role in a nation’s competitive position and well-being than do many of their counterparts in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) world. The International Energy Agency—a proxy for liberal, global market-based approaches—defines energy security as “the uninterrupted availability of energy sources at an affordable price.”4
Member countries (including the United States) have worked to create a coordinated system for managing strategic oil reserves, share information through fantastic data resources like the Energy Information Administration (EIA), and generally leverage transparency and market forces to achieve their objectives.
PRC energy policymakers tend to take a different approach. They harbor a quasi-autarchic mindset rooted in decades of policy premised on fearing and avoiding interdependence and imports. Stripping complex equations and regression analysis from contemporary PRC scholarship on energy security frequently leaves behind a stark conclusion: the more energy a country can source from within its own borders, the better off it will be.5
General Secretary Xi Jinping’s admonition to delegates of the 20th Party Congress in October 2022 that China must “be prepared for the worst-case scenarios, and be ready to withstand high winds, choppy waters and even dangerous storms” exemplifies this worldview.6 Xi has made clear that energy is part of this stormbreaker strategy, telling workers at China’s second-largest oilfield in October 2021 that the country must “ensure that its ‘energy rice bowl’ remains in its own hands.”7
Full article here: https://strategicspace.nbr.org/energy-as-a-strategic-space-for-china-words-and-actions-point-to-a-competitive-future/
Full presentation here:
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