"More capitalist than the U.S. ever dreamed of becoming, and viciously so," said one Chinese expert at a closed meeting of the private sector and the U.S. intelligence community.

China now has a score of billionaires. The Chinese jet-set courses the world in G-5s, spend the night in $12,000 suites in Dubai, charter $30,000-a-day boats with helipads in the Caribbean -- and run business conglomerates in China. The only rule they have to obey is to keep their nose out of politics. Otherwise, anything goes. Futurologists didn't see this tectonic geopolitical upheaval coming.

In 1972, the late, great know-it-all Herman Kahn, the "super genius of futurology," coauthored (with B. Bruce-Briggs) "Things to Come." Its 490 pages looked at the "Seventies and Eighties," but oil wasn't mentioned once. 1972 was the year Saudi King Feisal secretly pledged to Egypt's President Anwar Sadat an oil embargo against the West should Egypt sustain reverses in a war against Israel.

The surprise attack by Egypt and Syria, known as the Yom Kippur War, came Oct. 6, 1973. After initial Egyptian battlefield successes, Israel punched back. No sooner did Gen. Arik Sharon cross to the west side of the Suez Canal Oct. 16, ten days after the war began, than King Feisal delivered on his pledge to close the oil tap. The Saudi-led embargo quadrupled the price of oil in short order -- from $3 to $12 a barrel -- and triggered a major shift in the geopolitics of the region.

As the United States got bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, futurologists also overlooked the deployment of armies of Chinese purchasing agents to developing countries from Southeast Asia to Africa to Latin America. Armed with billions of surplus dollars from accumulated reserves of almost $1 trillion (earned chiefly from cheap exports to the United States), Chinese snapped up all manner of raw materials and oil to feed its double-digit growth. More recently, political leaders from 48 of Africa's 53 independent countries, including 40 heads of state, were invited to Beijing for an unprecedented summit meeting to seal long-term commercial accords laced with coveted low-interest loans. Suddenly, China was seen as sub-Saharan Africa's principal benefactor.

To keep pace with its gargantuan energy needs, China has also embarked on the world's most ambitious nuclear power expansion -- 40 new plants by 2020. But this still won't produce more than 5 percent of the new industrial giant's energy. And these will be overshadowed by an astounding 450 coal-fired power stations now slated for construction.

Seventy percent of China's power consumption will still be coal-based, an industry that will consume $100 billion in extraction programs to produce 3 billion tons of coal a year through 2020. In the past five years alone, coal mining has increased by 80 percent. Double-digit growth, if sustained, would demand 5 or even 6 billion tons of coal per year.

For the next two decades, Chinese domestic coal will remain more important than foreign oil. From 7 million barrels of oil per day at present, China's oil needs are expected to double to 14 million barrels a day in the next 14 years. And from 28 million vehicles today, China is expected to field 170 million cars and trucks by 2020 and 400 million by 2030. The United States still has the lead with 243 million vehicles (including 28 million damaged in accidents and one million stolen per year).

The emerging superpower will soon be spewing more pollutants into the atmosphere than the United States. In some Chinese cities, one can barely see across the street.

Income discrepancies -- and the absence of minimum rule of law -- caused 85,000 major "disturbances" last year as corrupt local party chiefs appropriated land to enrich themselves with everything from hotels to casinos.

At the closed meeting organized by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, American experts on China said there is a growing mismatch between availability and needs. Energy governance is panting to catch up. There is no single voice on reforms to improve energy management. There are government departments that don't talk to each other. The 1999 fuel tax is yet to be implemented. The biggest vacuum is the lack of an energy ministry "with the needed coercive powers."

China's oil companies are the country's most influential because former ministers who know how to bypass the bureaucracy head them. Corporate interests already compete with the government's. One non-Chinese who raises money for the energy sector said the biggest headache is the lack of qualified personnel. Some of the jobs require ten years of training. But bankers are hiring anyone who can do an electronic spreadsheet.

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