China’s imports last year broke yet another record, despite talk of waning oil demand. Since the start of this year, the world’s biggest oil importer has continued buying crude at elevated rates, but this may be about to change as prices extend their rally.
Brent crude has been hovering around $70 per barrel for over a week now, and the outlook remains rather bullish compared to forecasts from the end of 2025, which could not foresee the latest geopolitical developments and their potential implications for supply security. China, while not as sensitive to international oil prices as its neighbor India, is still sensitive to these prices. And it has built up a nice inventory of crude.
Those record imports in 2025 averaged 11.55 million barrels daily. That was a 4.4% increase on the previous year, yet not all of that oil was refined. In fact, a lot of it was stockpiled. From March 2025 onwards, “we started to see a very impressive rate of stockpiling, like close to one million barrels per day,” Frederic Lasserre, global head of research and analysis at commodity trading giant Gunvor, said last September.
Not only was China stockpiling crude at elevated rates, but it was making steps to expand its oil inventory by building new storage sites—a total of 11 of these, with a combined capacity of as much as 169 million barrels. Now, some observers speculated at the time that China was stocking up on oil as it prepares to take Taiwan, in anticipation of a reaction from the U.S. but since nothing has happened around Taiwan for the time being, this remains only speculation.
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A rather more obvious explanation for China’s oil buying behavior comes from its track record as an importer: China buys more oil when it’s cheap and less when it becomes expensive. This is, in fact, the normal behavior of any importer of any commodity. China is simply the biggest one and, as such, attracts the most attention. Last year, oil was cheap. It was cheap because oil traders were so confident the oil glut was as huge as the IEA estimated, they paid no attention to geopolitics. This year, geopolitics has become a lot more difficult to ignore, and the IEA is revising its estimates. Oil has climbed higher, and Chinese buyers may be starting to feel it.
A recent report said that Chinese refiners and traders have been buying record amounts of Russian crude, with the average daily for February estimated at close to 2.1 million barrels daily, according to Kpler. That would be up from 1.7 million barrels daily in January and a result of Indian refiners’ pullback under U.S. pressure to stop buying Russian crude. Because of that pullback, Russian oil is fetching even deeper discounts than before, which is very welcome news for Chinese buyers.
