China's Energy and Resource Uses: Continuity and Change

Abstract

Recent writings on China's achievements during the last quarter of the 20th century stress, almost without exception, the enormity of change. But, for both universal and particular reasons, this survey of the country's energy resources and uses will stress continuity as much as change. Taking the inertia of complex energy systems as the key universal given, the most important particular explanation lies in peculiarities of China's resource endowment.