1
NORTHEAST ASIAN RESOURCE SECURITY STRATEGIES AND
INTERNATIONAL RESOURCE POLITICS IN ASIA
Jeffrey D. Wilson
Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University
1
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Asian Studies Review, 2014, 38(1): 15-35.
(© Taylor & Francis). Available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10357823.2013.853027
Abstract: Soaring prices for minerals and energy are posing a major threat to the resource
security of economies in Asia. As a result, many regional governments have launched new
resource security strategies in the last few years. Most recent attention to resource security
in Asia has focussed on debating whether the Chinese governmentȂs resource policies are
mercantilist or liberal. This China-focused debate is too narrow to fully capture the nature
of resource politics in Northeast Asia, since the governments of Japan and Korea have also
recently launched their own resource security strategies. This paper considers regional-level
trends in Asian resource politics by examining the causes, content and implications of the
resource security strategies deployed by the consumer governments in Northeast Asia. It
argues that growing resource-security concerns, combined with a process of competitive
policy emulation, have seen the Chinese, Japanese and Korean governments each adopt
mercantilist resource security strategies over the last decade. Furthermore, the competitive
nature of these mercantilist strategies is acting to intensify political and economic
competition for resources between the Asian regionȂs three main economic powers.
Keywords: Resource security; mercantilism; Northeast Asia; China; Japan; Korea;
international relations
1
Correspondence address: Asia Research Centre, School of Management and Governance, Murdoch
University, Murdoch WA 6150 Australia. Email: j.wilson@murdoch.edu.au