ABSTRACT
China seeks diversified and reliable energy supplies to fuel its rapidly growing economy, which expanded at 10.3 per cent annually 1990-2000, giving a doubling rate of just under seven years. Rapid economic growth continued into the twenty-first century, with the country posting a 9.1 per cent increase in GDP in 2003. In 1971 China’s share in the world’s primary energy demand was a mere 5 per cent (with 23 per cent of the world’s population). By 2020, the International Energy Agency estimates that China’s share of global primary energy demand will be 16 per cent, while its share of global population will have shrunk to 19 per cent.2 In 2002 alone China’s energy demand grew by nearly one-fifth.3
