A Brief Note on Methodology

To better understand the relationship between China’s natural resources and strategic priorities, the Phase Zero project team identified 42 key indicators. These indicators measure China’s engagement with the world in various units, ranging from the dollar value of investments to the number of Confucius Institutes in a country, and are the most current data available for each category. The list has the potential to be iterative, as we find new relevant data and update some data. The team started building a matrix with countries China has publicly identified as important partners, such as participants in the Belt and Road Initiative, and then expanded to 180 countries, as trade and other data pointed to the importance of additional countries.

The Phase Zero team then sorted certain indicators into three bins: (1) Resources; (2) Military-to-Military (Mil-Mil); and (3) Soft Power. The resource ranking map reflects only the first bin: Resources.

The values of the indicators within each bin are scored on linear scales of 1-10. For the Resources bin, the indicators are not only significant in of themselves, but also in relative terms. China, for example, has 101 suppliers of oil, but Russia supplies more than 14 percent of that oil, and Saudi Arabia almost 12 percent. We developed weighted Resources rankings to reflect the relative scale and scope of these resource relationships. Phase Zero took all of the indicators related to natural resources into account in ranking the countries in order of importance to China’s resource security. This is a composite index based off of the data available.

The full methodology document can be downloaded here.