Summary
Why does China act as it does in its pursuit of energy security? Are resource wars inevitable? Going beyond traditional analyses that focus on China as a regional and global threat, Jean Garrison sheds new light on the roots of the country s energy policy and the constraints that it faces.
Garrison eschews the zero-sum approaches that underlie much conceptualization of the subject, arguing that they are in large part based on the erroneous notion that China is a unitary actor with a coherent energy strategy. Her attention to the competing developmental and environmental priorities at play in China s domestic politics is a critical contribution to the global energy-security debate.