NPR looks at China’s efforts to buy up oil and other energy resources around the world, even from governments that are shunned by most countries:
Philip Andrews-Speed, an energy expert at the University of Dundee in Scotland, says that by doing this, China is actually increasing the global supply of oil.
“They’re going in and producing in countries that otherwise people might not be producing in. So actually, at the margins, they are producing more oil to market than would be if nobody was going into those countries,” Andrews-Speed says.
He says oil producers have various reasons for selling to China.
Some poorer nations want the infrastructure investment that China often pledges to sweeten an oil deal. Other countries, like Venezuela, see China as a political counterweight to the United States.
But many are just betting that the global focus of political and economic power is shifting China’s way.
