Beijing —  

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.

Electric vehicles are ready for export from a port in Shanghai last spring.
Electric vehicles are ready for export from a port in Shanghai last spring. 
China Daily/Reuters

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.