China Reform Monitor reports that the Christian Science Monitor carried an article on China's energy needs, and reported that China is seeking an atomic partnership with Australia. Beijing, which has already announced plans to supplement its nine existing nuclear-power plants with forty to fifty additional facilities over the next two decades, has entered into negotiations with Canberra regarding the acquisition of uranium. If concluded, the deal would substantially expand ties between China and Australia – which retains 41 percent of the world’s easily extractable uranium and already serves as an energy supplier for the PRC.

 

The negotiations have raised new fears of nuclear proliferation in Asia, and of the potential benefit to China’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Australia’s Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, has assured the Australian parliament that the uranium deal – which is expected to be concluded within the next 12 months – would only go ahead with the proper safeguards to ensure that the uranium would not be used to build nuclear weapons and not be given to other countries. But analysts like David Noonan of the Australian Conservation Foundation fear that such safeguards would be inadequate, and that the arrangement would create “a dangerous precedent of selling [nuclear materiel] to a new country which is not an open society.”

 

China has broken ground on the 240 kilometers of the Kazakhstan-China oil pipeline situated in the country’s western Xinjiang Province, the SinoCast China Business Daily News reports. The planned pipeline, which will stretch over 3,000 kilometers from the Caspian port city of Atyrau in Kazakhstan to Dushanzi in Xinjiang, is expected to come online in December of 2005. Once fully operational, the energy route is expected to be able to carry some 20,000 tons of Caspian oil annually to China.

 

Prayer Action: While thousands of Chinese are turning to Christ every day for which we praise God, there is also the problem of an emerging giant colossus in Asia that will greatly affect the power struggles in the world in years to come. Pray that China's leadership will carefully observe the agreements they are making and use their resources for only for peaceful purposes.