Chinese “Gas Policy” towards Russia and Turkmenistan, 2001–2012
Abstract
The ambition of the paper is to analyze the major characteristics of the Chinese energy policy towards the most important producers of natural gas in China’s neighborhood. The analytical perspectives of a strategic approach to energy security and state-centric realism are used to work with case studies of Sino-Russian and Sino-Turkmen relations from the energy security perspective. The paper concludes that China’s energy policy towards the given producers in Russia and Turkmenistan comes significantly close to the selected analytical perspectives and that natural gas has become an important part of the strategic considerations of the Chinese political leadership. This conclusion, however, applies more to Turkmenistan and less to Russia, as in the case of the Sino-Russian relations, both parties fail to achieve a mutual complementarity, and economic thinking prevails over Beijing’s strategic interests.
Keywords
China, energy policy, natural gas, strategic approach, state-centric realism, Russia, Turkmenistan
Author Biography
Hedvika Koďousková
Born in 1984, she holds a master's degree in international relations from the Faculty of Social Studies at Masaryk University in Brno (FSS MU). In 2012, she successfully completed her doctoral studies there, focusing on China's foreign energy policy. Her academic interests include the conceptualization of energy security, geopolitical aspects of energy, and energy relations in Asia. In 2009 and 2011, she participated in study stays in the United Kingdom and China. She was a co-investigator on the analysis for the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs titled "Zkapalněný zemní plyn: Potenciál pro energetickou bezpečnost EU" (2009) and the principal investigator of the project "Ruské aktivity v zemích vyvážejících zkapalněný zemní plyn" (2010). She currently serves as project manager of "Innovating Teaching at FSS – KMVES," co-financed by the European Social Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic, and also works as a research fellow at the International Institute of Political Science (IIPS MU) and is a member of the CENERS platform.