China's Oil Future: A Case of Modest Expectations

Much has been written recently about China's emergence as a potential oil power. Comparisons have ranged from those that picture China as another Middle East, with a Middle East-like impact on future global oil markets, to more modest images of an oil-producing nation that can meet its rapidly expanding internal needs through the late 1980s and still have some oil for export to its neighbor, Japan. Yet to fulfill even the latter prediction, the People's Republic of China will have to surmou...