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China is building automobiles faster than any country in the world, almost as many as Japan and the United States put together. Their total number of cars on the road is still small compared to the United States’ but that will change very quickly because of the massive number of cars being produced. The obvious question is where is all of the gasoline, (oil) going to come from to power those cars. Obviously it is got to come from where the oil is and that is the Middle East. Since the United States is militarily protecting Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait the obvious answer is Iran. However, for China there is a really big problem of getting that oil from Iran to China. There are only two routes. (1) By sea, through the Straits of Hormuz controlled by the US, and through the Straits of Malacca at Singapore controlled at both ends by the US and through the area between the Philipines and Taiwan controlled by the US. (2) The other route is over land through a pipe line which would probably be the most economical method for them to move the oil. The closest point of China is only one country away from Iran and the distance is only 800 miles comparable to the Alaska pipeline. The distances and technical difficulties are almost insurmountable but they do have another problem. That single intervening country is Afghanistan and it is presently held militarily by, you guessed it, The United States. China has been very friendly with Iran and has built a Chery (a legally contested US Chevy knockoff ) automobile manufacturing plant there to sweeten their relationship. But, it is rather rude toward the US to do that.

China has been loaning money to the US for years, and are practically floating its economy and it puts them into serious debt. What does the US do with all that Chinese money? They buy oil with it on the world market, ultimately the Middle East, to run their hugely impractical automobile and airplane fleets. So, how will all of this work out? How will China gets its oil? I don’t know but it is only one factious little country with a total population of 28 million that only equals a portion of number of the 32 million excess males under age 20 in China.  These Chinese boys are soon to be of military age, well you get the idea, they can afford a massive ground military conflict which the US wouldn’t even dream of engaging in.

The presently contested part of Afghanistan is in red.

The presently most contested part of Afghanistan is in red.

There is a 200 mile long unoccupied Wakhan Corridor stretching from the border of China to the more open areas of Afghanistan and it’s about 600 miles across that mostly mountainous area to the border of Iran for a total of 800 miles from China to Iran. However, there is a great mix of cultures across that area. The existing Trans-Alaska Pipeline is also 800 miles long. Both of these pipelines go over cold desolate high altitude places. If the Americans could do it technically the Chinese can do it and they have even more motivation because they don’t have enough native oil to run their newly build cars. The total distance the oil must travel to Beijing is over 3,000 miles but that probably isn’t near the economic size or technical difficultly as was the Three Gorges Dam and that was done having to displace millions of unwilling people. This pipeline would almost always be through remote places and would physically displace very few people. Even if the Afghan people have millennia of very hostile behavior toward foreign invasion it is unlikely they could cope with a determined Chinese presence whose only non-negotionable demand was a safe pipeline.

I am no diplomat but I can see an obvious problem in the not distant future. It is a Chinese problem today but they will soon make it into a global problem.