ABSTRACT
How does modern China define and communicate its identity in international energy relations, and how does China make its energy choices? This is the central question that this chapter addresses. It starts with China’s quest for “self-reliance” in the 1950s and the story of the Daqing oilfield. Further, it discusses the legacy of “self-reliance” and explains how China transitioned to the “going global” energy strategy in the era of “reform and opening-up” in the 1990s and the early 2000s. The second part of this chapter focuses on China’s discursive politics of energy in the mid-2000s and the early 2010s. It identifies the dominant discursive constructions in China’s energy politics and traces how they shifted and changed over the past ten years. Further, the chapter determines how these discursive constructions support and sustain specific interpretations of China’s energy strategy while excluding others or rendering them marginal. Finally, this analysis identifies norms, meanings, and ideas that constitute China’s energy paradigm.
