Competition for strategic natural resources — including water, mineral ores and fossil fuels — has always played a significant role in shaping the terms of the international economic and political order. However, now that competition has intensified and it encompasses virtually all of Asia, where growing populations and rapid economic development over the past three decades have generated an insatiable appetite for severely limited supplies of key commodities.
Asia is the world’s most resource-poor continent, and overexploitation of the natural resources that it does possess has created an environmental crisis that is contributing to regional climate change. For example, the Tibetan Plateau, which contains the world’s third-largest store of ice, is warming at almost twice the average global rate, owing to the rare convergence of high altitudes and low latitudes — with potentially serious consequences for Asia’s freshwater supply.
In other words, three interconnected crises — a resource crisis, an environmental crisis and a climate crisis — are threatening Asia’s economic, social and ecological future. Population growth, urbanization and industrialization are exacerbating resource-related stresses, with some cities experiencing severe water shortages and degrading of the environment — as anyone who has experienced Beijing’s smog can attest. Fossil fuel and water subsidies have contributed to both problems.
Faced with severe supply constraints, Asian economies are increasingly tapping other continents’ fossil fuels, mineral ores and timber. However, water is extremely difficult — and prohibitively expensive — to import. And Asia has less fresh water per person than any continent other than Antarctica, and some of the world’s worst water pollution.
Likewise, food scarcity is a growing problem for Asian countries, with crop yields and overall food production growing more slowly than demand. At the same time, rising incomes are altering people’s diets, which now include more animal-based proteins, further compounding Asia’s food challenges.
The intensifying competition over natural resources among Asian countries is shaping resource geopolitics, including the construction of oil and gas pipelines. China has managed to secure new hydrocarbon supplies through pipelines from Kazakhstan and Russia. This option is not available to Asia’s other leading economies — Japan, India and South Korea — which are not contiguous with suppliers in Central Asia, Iran or Russia. These countries will remain dependent on oil imports from an increasingly unstable Persian Gulf.
Furthermore, China’s fears that hostile naval forces could hold its economy hostage by interdicting its oil imports have prompted it to build a massive oil reserve and to plan two strategic energy corridors in southern Asia. The corridors will provide a more direct transport route for oil and liquefied gas from Africa and the Persian Gulf, while minimizing exposure to sea lanes policed by the US Navy.
One such corridor extends 800km from the Bay of Bengal across Myanmar to southern China. In addition to gas pipelines — the first is scheduled to be completed this year — it will include a high-speed railroad and a highway from the Burmese coast to China’s Yunnan Province, offering China’s remote interior provinces an outlet to the sea for the first time.
The other corridor — work on which has been delayed, owing to an insurrection in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province — is to stretch from the Chinese-operated port at Gwadar, near Pakistan’s border with Iran, through the Karakoram mountains to the landlocked, energy-producing Xinjiang Province. Notably, in giving China control of its strategic Gwadar port in February, Pakistan has permitted the Chinese government to build a naval base there.
Given the significant role that natural resources have historically played in global strategic relations — including driving armed interventions and full-scale wars — increasingly murky resource geopolitics threaten to exacerbate existing tensions among Asian countries. Rising dependence on energy imports has already been used to rationalize an increased emphasis on maritime power, raising new concerns about sea-lane safety and vulnerability to supply disruptions.
This partly explains the current tensions between China and Japan over their conflicting territorial claims to islands in the East China Sea, which occupy an area of only 7km2, but are surrounded by rich hydrocarbon reserves. Disputes in the South China Sea involving China and five of its neighbors — including Taiwan — and in southern Asia, are equally resource-driven.
While strategic competition for resources will continue to shape Asia’s security dynamics, the associated risks can be moderated if Asia’s leaders establish norms and institutions aimed at building rule-based cooperation. Unfortunately, little progress has been made in this area. For example, 53 of Asia’s 57 transnational river basins lack any water-sharing or cooperative arrangement.
Indeed, Asia is one of only two continents, along with Africa, where regional integration has yet to take hold, largely because political and cultural diversity, and historical animosities, have hindered institution-building. Strained political relations among most of Asia’s sub-regions make a region-wide security structure or more effective resource cooperation difficult to achieve.
This could have significant implications for Asia’s ostensibly unstoppable rise — and thus for the West’s supposedly inevitable decline. After all, Asian economies cannot sustain their impressive economic growth without addressing their resource, environmental and security challenges — and no single country can do it alone.
Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
For the incoming Administration of President-elect William Lai (賴清德), successfully deterring a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attack or invasion of democratic Taiwan over his four-year term would be a clear victory. But it could also be a curse, because during those four years the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) will grow far stronger. As such, increased vigilance in Washington and Taipei will be needed to ensure that already multiplying CCP threat trends don’t overwhelm Taiwan, the United States, and their democratic allies. One CCP attempt to overwhelm was announced on April 19, 2024, namely that the PLA had erred in combining major missions
The Constitutional Court on Tuesday last week held a debate over the constitutionality of the death penalty. The issue of the retention or abolition of the death penalty often involves the conceptual aspects of social values and even religious philosophies. As it is written in The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, the government’s policy is often a choice between the lesser of two evils or the greater of two goods, and it is impossible to be perfect. Today’s controversy over the retention or abolition of the death penalty can be viewed in the same way. UNACCEPTABLE Viewing the
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused