China’s “economic miracle” faces an existential threat now that the nation is the world’s largest importer of oil. The Chinese central authorities mandated a $275-billion crash investment in fracking to develop cheap energy from China’s 30 trillion cubic meters of natural gas trapped in the world’s largest shale fields. But China’s effort to knockoff America’s oil and gas fracking boom appears to have failed. China seems doomed to continue to destroy its industrial competitiveness by relying on high-cost energy imports. The head of China’s National Energy Administration (CNEA) quietly admitted last week that the country’s bold effort to follow the United States’s lead in launching an oil and gas boom based on hydraulic fracking of shale is failing. CNEA central planners promised domestic fracking would produce 80 billion cubic meters of cheap natural gas a year by 2020. But CNEA’s estimate for domestic gas production has been revised down […]