A small increase could make refiners willing to sell more diesel and power companies willing to generate more electricity, while having little effect on residents' desire to buy diesel and power, he explained.
But a larger increase in diesel and electricity prices could dampen over all Chinese demand, by persuading Chinese vehicle owners and factory managers to conserve. This could potentially hurt oil consumption and prices around the world.
Nobody knows how large an increase would be needed to hurt Chinese demand significantly. "It's just a mess trying to forecast this," Brown said.
To be sure, central planning has also had advantages for China's energy markets. Sweeping aside environmental, land use and financial hurdles that can delay power stations in the West for years, China has embarked on a binge of construction of new power plants, many of them coal-fired.
These are already starting to make blackouts less common elsewhere in China and hold the promise of eventually letting the electricity supply catch up with demand even here in the Pearl River Delta, which rivals the Yangtze River Delta around Shanghai as one of China's two main export powerhouses.
Henry Zhang, the general manager of the Shishi Hengyi Textile Product Trade Company in Shishi City in east-central China, said that his factory had already noticed an improvement. The factory was blacked out two days a week in 2003, a day a week last year and this year, none at all.
"This year, we have no problems," he said.
But blackouts have been a serious problem for years here in Guangzhou, the biggest city in the Pearl River Delta, and they are worse this spring as oil-fired plants have shut down, though coal-fired power plants have kept running.
Diesel generators have become a necessity for factories across much of China in the last few years, as electricity demand has soared past supply, and they have helped turn China into the world's second-largest oil importer, after the United States. Factories receive priority in diesel shipments, and 19 representatives of companies from across China said in separate interviews at the trade fair here that they had not had trouble buying enough diesel to refill their fuel tanks periodically.
Yet the generators are costly in many ways.
The diesel alone costs two to three times as much per kilowatt generated as electricity from power plants, managers complain, and on top of that are labor costs for maintenance and operation as well as the cost of the generator and the cost of space to put the generator and its fuel tank.
The generators, particularly older, domestically manufactured models, also rank among the biggest polluters in a country with some of the worst air pollution.
Generator sales are an important barometer of long-term business confidence in the national power grid. But while China has moved ahead of the United States to become the world's largest market for industrial-size generators, there are signs that some businesses are hoping the country's overburdened power stations will catch up.
At Cummins Inc., generator sales surged last year but have evened out at that high level so far this year, said John Watkins, the president of the company's East Asian operations.
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