Executive Summary

In the past three decades, China has emerged from an impoverished country to become an economic power with an expanding middle class and more megacities than anywhere else in this planet. This phenomenal transformation has been fueled by massive quantities of resources such as oil, gas, coal, iron ore, and water and food. Working on very limited domestic resources, like every other major power in modern history, China has embarked on a global quest for these critical resources to meet its growing demand. Of all the critical resources, energy, water and food deserve the most attention.

At the global level, China’s projection of its domestic resource shortage overseas raised alarm. There is growing fear that the Chinese global quest for resources will cause resource scarcity and rising commodity prices. State-owned enterprises are sourcing around the globe for resources; striking deals at terms no other competitors could equal and investing in countries where western counterparts are reluctant to go. While the resource-rich countries benefit from the Chinese investment, they still worry about the consequences for their environment, labour and social governance. As concerns of China’s resource quest spread well beyond the economic arena, scholars, security experts, government officials and politicians worry about prospect of resource wars, or Chinese control over global resources for political and security purposes. An important area of contention on the implication of China’s global resource quest is China’s role in global resource governance. Given the size and rapid growth of China, together with its increasing assertiveness, China’s global resource quest certainly presents a challenge to the established global order.

But the dynamics and the future impact of China’s growing demand for water, food and energy on the architecture of global governance and the developing world are far from clear.To determine the extent to which China’s rise will change the global resource governance, it is critical to analyseChina’s participation in the global trade and investment regime, climate change management, international laws, and its stance on development policy. Against this background, this workshop on China’s global quest for food, energy and water and its global implications was organised by the China Programme of the RSIS’ Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS) on 31 October 2014.

This workshop brought together distinguished participants from China, Australia, United Kingdom, Japan, Central Asia and Singapore to present their views from both domestic and international perspectives on the multifaceted reality of China’s resource quest with a focus on the three interlinked strategic resources, namely, food, water and energy as well as its global implications.