China, the
, would suffer significant economic costs from a long-term, large-scale oil outage in the Middle East. Still, it would fare better than other regional economies, such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Not only does the People’s Republic of China (PRC) enjoy greater domestic oil production than any of those Asian democracies, but its economy is about as oil-intensive as Japan’s or Taiwan’s, and much less so than South Korea’s. Accordingly, while an oil crisis would bring real pain to the PRC, it might empower Beijing relative to its regional rivals.
