How will maritime security cooperation between ASEAN states and China evolve? Clearly, such collaboration is in its infancy when compared to the long-standing and quite well developed naval joint training exercises between some ASEAN countries, and between them and the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Britain and India, or between some ASEAN countries and the Japan Coast Guard. These exercises take place under structured frameworks and formal agreements negotiated by the parties involved. Many of them are also being adapted to include unconventional threats against shipping and sealanes, including pirate and terrorist attacks.

Chinese naval vessels have called at Singapore and the ports of some other regional nations. But that is about the extent so far of maritime security cooperation between China and ASEAN members.

What are the realities of power politics versus the prospects for cooperative security between ASEAN and China? The latter could be based on a common need to protect vital sea lanes and straits used for international shipping from attacks by pirates, terrorists and other potential sources of supply disruption. Whether forms of cooperative security evolve between China and Southeast Asian states will depend to a large degree on the future scale of China's seaborne energy imports; from where Bejing gets them; and, most important of all, how China seeks to secure these vital supplies.

One thing is clear: if China continues to grow at anything like the rate of recent years, it will become increasingly dependent on imports of oil and gas, including liquified natural gas, or LNG, carried over long distances by sea from exporting countries to China's industrial and urban east coast heartland. In 1993, China ceased to be a net exporter of oil and became a net importer. Today, it is the fastest growing user of oil in the world, ahead of energyefficient Japan and second only to the United States in terms of total consumption and imports.

China's demand for transport fuel is projected to grow sharply while production from its onshore oil fields continue to stagnate or decline. As a result, Chinese oil consumption is expected to rise by almost a third to 300 million metric tons by 2010.