Episode Details

China just cut oil consumption by a staggering amount — and almost no one is talking about it.

In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone break down the data showing China was responsible for ~74% of the entire global decline in crude oil imports during the recent Iran conflict. Seaborne imports down ~40%. Refining runs crushed. Oil prices that should have spiked instead collapsed back toward pre-war levels the moment a temporary peace deal was signed.

Official explanations (strategic reserves, EV adoption, buyer strikes, commercial margins, Taiwan blockade drills) don’t hold up under scrutiny. The numbers point to something far more serious: China has likely been artificially propping up oil demand for years to hide a deeper economic collapse — real estate crash, capital flight, post-COVID manufacturing flight, and extreme power consolidation under Xi.

We also get into the Li Keqiang Index, the secret CCP coup you weren’t told about, capital flight into Western housing markets, dystopian Chinese creator culture (cute car-living girls and bridge livestream farms), and why the patterns look a lot more like systemic weakness than clever strategy.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Malcolm Collins: Hello, Symone. I’m excited to be here with you today. World-changing, civilization-changing information has dropped, and no one is talking about it. And so we need to talk about it for our fans here, because at least they can be informed about- I’m gonna... Y’all, guys, guys, guys, you think I am overstating things here, so I’ll just go through the data we’re gonna be looking at real quick.

[00:00:24] And if you have an understanding of economics, you’re gonna immediately be like, “What?” happening. So, throughout the course of the war oil, gas prices didn’t really go up that much.

[00:00:37] Simone Collins: The I- the Iran war?

[00:00:38] Malcolm Collins: The Iran war. Okay. And, and now when, when the, they had the brief peace they were actually at a rate that around what they were at the beginning of the war.

[00:00:46] Okay. And we’ll go over the prices, but that’s kind of crazy given that oil’s still not coming through the Strait of Hormuz. Now, what a lot of people are saying, because they want to dunk on Trump without actually knowing, like, globally, geopolitically what’s going on, they go, “Oh, well, this is because the US released their strategic reserves.”

[00:01:06] The reality of the situation is that, that the US releasing its strategic reserves really did not impact the situation that much at all. What actually was the big impact on this situation was China reducing the oil that they are consuming. In fact, 74% of the entire global decline in crude oil imports and trade came just from China consuming less.

[00:01:34] All right? The, the amount less that China is consuming has been larger than, and dramatically larger than, the impact of the US, all of Europe, and Japan releasing their strategic reserves combined.

[00:01:52] Simone Collins: How sudden or gradual has this been? ‘Cause I know China’s been investing heavily in solar. Is that what’s going on maybe in renewables?

[00:02:00] Malcolm Collins: Not at all. No. So the, their, their solar investments have been major. Now around 50% of the cars sold in China are electric- Yeah ... which is pretty crazy. But that accounts for a r- around 2% reduction in the amount of oil they use every year historically. What?

[00:02:15] Simone Collins: Oh,

[00:02:15] Malcolm Collins: my-

[00:02:15] So-

[00:02:15] Simone Collins: I mean, I th- man, oh, I thought that would be way more significant.

[00:02:18] What’s the point of electric cars if that’s all that they do?

[00:02:22] Malcolm Collins: That’s, that’s where