SINGAPORE — Since China's surging demand for oil started to exceed domestic production in the early 1990s, Beijing has been preparing for a range of possible threats to its energy supply — including turmoil in the Middle East.
The world's second largest oil consumer after the United States has part-financed and built, or is building, a network of transnational pipelines to import crude oil from fields in Central Asia and Russia.
Chinese state-owned companies are also constructing a 1,100-km pipeline through Myanmar to carry oil imports from the Middle East and Africa into southwestern China, bypassing the increasingly congested Straits of Malacca and Singapore.