A considerable body of economic literature shows the adverse economic impacts of oil-price shocks for the developed economies. However, there has been a lack of empirical study of this kind on China and other developing countries. This paper attempts to fill this gap by answering how and to what extent oil-price shocks impact China's economy, emphasizing on the price transmission mechanisms. To that end, we develop a structural vector auto-regressive model. Our results show that an oil-price increase negatively affects output and investment, but positively affects inflation rate and interest rate. However, with the differentiated price control policies for materials and intermediates on the one hand and final products on the other hand in China, the impact on real economy, represented by real output and real investment, lasts much longer than that to price/monetary variables. Our decomposition results also show that the short-term impact, namely output decrease induced by the cut of capacity-utilization rate, is greater in the first one to two years, but the portion of the long-term impact, defined as the impact realized through an investment change, increases steadily and exceeds that of short-term impact at the end of the second year. Afterwards, the long-term impact dominates, and maintains for quite some time.

China, from its own perspective cannot afford to, and from an international perspective, is not allowed to continue on the conventional path of encouraging economic growth at the expense of the environment. The country needs to transform its economy to effectively address concern about a range of environmental problems from burning fossil fuels and steeply rising oil import and international pressure to exhibit greater ambition in fighting global climate change. This paper first discusses China's own efforts towards energy saving and pollutants cutting, the widespread use of renewable energy and participation in clean development mechanism, and puts carbon reductions of China's unilateral actions into perspective. Given that transition to a low carbon economy cannot take place overnight, the paper then discusses China's policies on promoting the use of low-carbon energy technologies and nuclear power and efforts to secure stable oil and gas supplies during this transition period. Based on these discussions, the paper provides some recommendations on issues related to energy conservation and pollution control, wind power, nuclear power, clean coal technologies, and overseas oil and gas supplies, and articulates a roadmap for China regarding its climate commitments to 2050.