Northeast Asian Resource Security Strategies and International Resource Politics in Asia

Abstract:

Soaring prices for minerals and energy are posing a major threat to the resource security of economies in Asia. As a result, many regional governments have launched new resource security strategies in the last few years. Most recent attention to resource security in Asia has focused on debating whether the Chinese government’s resource policies are mercantilist or liberal. This China-focused debate is too narrow to fully capture the nature of resource politics in Northeast Asia, since the governments of Japan and Korea have also recently launched their own resource security strategies. This paper considers regional-level trends in Asian resource politics by examining the causes, content and implications of the resource security strategies deployed by the consumer governments in Northeast Asia. It argues that growing resource security concerns, combined with a process of competitive policy emulation, have seen the Chinese, Japanese and Korean governments each adopt mercantilist resource security strategies over the last decade. Furthermore, the competitive nature of these mercantilist strategies is acting to intensify political and economic competition for resources between the Asian region’s three main economic powers.

Keywords:

• resource security
• mercantilism
• Northeast Asia
• China
• Japan
• Korea
• international relations

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank David Envall, Shahar Hameiri, Anita John, Richard Leaver, Paul Lushenko, Andrew Phillips, John Ravenhill and several anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on prior versions of this paper.

Notes

1. Given its sizeable reserves of some minerals, China is an exception, and has also promoted investment in domestic resource projects (particularly in the coal sector). See Ma (2006).

2. See statements by the Japanese (METI, 2010a), Korean (MOFAT, 2010) and Chinese (Garnaut, 2010) governments.

3. Particularly world iron ore and coal markets, which have historically been characterised by this form of negotiated pricing (Wilson, 2013, Chapters 4-6).

4. The China Development Bank and China Eximbank. The purpose of these policy banks is to provide finance to state-targeted investment projects at concessional rates.

5. These loans were to come from two state-owned banks (the Japan Bank for International Cooperation and the Korea Eximbank), and two state financing corporations (the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation and the Korea Resource Corporation).

6. Author's compilation, from INPEX Corporation (2010), JAPEX (2010), JX Holdings (2010) and Mitsubishi Corporation (2010).

7. Li Zhaoxin, quoted in Chen (2008, p. 81).

8. Author's compilation, from METI (2008b; 2009; 2010b) and MOFAT (various years).