Samo Burja criticizes analyst Peter Zeihan for promoting what he considers an incorrect view of China's fundamental, rather than incidental, energy dependence on imports.

China's imported energy supplies from the Middle East and Southeast Asia are vulnerable to a naval blockade at the Straits of Malacca in a major conflict.

China possesses vast shale oil deposits that are currently technically difficult to access but could be exploited with advancements in fracking technology.

Samo Burja characterizes the Russia-China relationship as an "alliance of convenience at best" due to deep, underlying conflicts of interest.

The primary remaining technological gaps for China relative to the West are in high-end CPUs, advanced machine tools, and jet engines.

The oil industry in China does not have the negative reputation it has in the West, where it is often associated with foreign policy adventurism.

China has the potential to develop most of its required natural resources domestically and is not fundamentally dependent on international trade for them.

China's status as a major oil producer is not widely recognized because it exports almost none of its domestic production.

Samo Burja believes China's strategic bet is that the United States is incapable of the massive re-industrialization needed to outproduce China by a factor of two or three.

A significant portion of Taiwan's wealthy elite holds substantial assets in mainland China, which could be seized by Beijing as a form of economic sanction.

Samo Burja argues that any U.S. federal policy for re-industrialization must be geographically concentrated in specific zones to be effective and cannot be dispersed across all 50 states.

According to a 2015 EIA estimate, China's 32 billion barrels of technically recoverable shale oil reserves are larger than Saudi Arabia's and rank third globally, behind only Russia and the United Sta...

Samo Burja predicts that once China's economy de-industrializes due to its aging population, it will be unable to re-industrialize.

In 2023, China's domestic oil production was approximately 4.2 million barrels per day, exceeding the output of Iran, Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates.

The issue of Taiwan is one of the few priorities for which the Chinese Communist Party would be willing to sacrifice economic growth, as losing Taiwan could undermine the party's domestic legitimacy.

Samo Burja predicts that a Western military strategy to blockade China and starve it of resources would ultimately fail, as China could exploit its domestic natural resources during a prolonged war.

Samo Burja asserts that China's energy strategy is driven by economic logic that prioritizes growth by purchasing the cheapest available oil, rather than a geopolitical strategy focused on energy secu...

Most countries in the Middle East are more politically favorable to the West than they are to China.

Samo Burja estimates that the combined industrial base of the Western alliance, including East Asia, the United States, and Europe, is approximately equal to that of China alone.

China's petrochemical industry has lagged behind other sectors in the country's economic development.