China's real weakness is not its economy but its geography: it imports almost all its oil across an ocean its navy cannot defend.

Physicist, formerly at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

China is surrounded by 15 countries who are mostly hostile to it, right? with no good like mountain ranges or rivers or anything to really separate them. And then they get all their oil, almost all their oil from the Middle East, right in countries that they don't control, don't have strong diplomatic relationships with on fleets of oil tankers that they can't defend because their navy doesn't have the ability to to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.