For a country which 30 years ago had a largely self-sufficient (if massively poor) economy under state command, digesting the impact of these changes in external energy and resource dependence on national political psychology and national strategic outlook is no small task.

Andrew Kennedy this week observes that ‘China’s soaring energy needs have generated considerable anxiety among Chinese strategists about the country’s ‘energy security’ and its strategic position more broadly. While China only became a net oil importer in 1993, it now meets more than 50 per cent of its oil needs through imports… Most of these imports are shipped from Africa and the Middle East, wending their way to China through the Indian Ocean and the narrow Malacca Strait. Worries about the vulnerability of these supply lines have helped motivate a range of Chinese policies in recent years; Beijing has supported its national oil companies (NOCs) as they invest overseas, approved pipeline projects to overland neighbours, concluded long-term supply contracts with producer states, started construction of a strategic petroleum reserve, and looked to build a more powerful navy.’

Rapid transformation from national economic and political insularity is a ‘scary’ process. When the impact of your involvement in international markets is so huge that it stretches global supply capacities and lifts prices so suddenly and in such an unpredicted ways, it is bound to raise deep national economic and political anxieties. Building trust and confidence in the reliability of international markets when many at the top of the political process have been tutored in command, not market, economics involves quite a learning process. And there are bound to be misjudgements and mistakes along the way, as we saw last year.

Despite the high oil and resource prices of recent years, some Chinese experts, as Kennedy points out, now have a more sanguine view of energy imports, and seek to reassure their compatriots that ‘external dependence is not scary’. China, the argument runs, has ‘to deepen its integration with international energy markets and institutions, rather than striking out on its own. Many of the policies and proposals of recent years are now seen as misguided, ineffective, and needlessly provocative. The view that national oil companies investments abroad provide a more reliable source of foreign oil is demonstrably naive.

What China has to get its head around on external resource dependence now is not without precedent. Japan and the other fundamentally resource-deficient states of Northeast Asia have had to confront the same demons. China’s energy and resource insecurities are already an issue of global dimensions. Getting China into the International Energy Agency is, Kennedy argues, a high priority in socializing China’s external dependence on oil. But Australia, as the most important supplier of resources to East Asia including China, has a crucial and sensitive role in shaping the external environment in which China’s energy insecurities can be managed. Australian resource companies have been negligent in their handling of this issue. And we are yet to see the development of a national policy strategy that begins to comprehend it, in bilateral, regional or global dealings with China.