China's $1 Trillion

China has over $1 trillion in foreign currency, mostly in government bonds. According to the NYT, China is going to diversify its holdings.

The NYT reported analysts saying something that seems silly to me:

"[China] would be able to invest some of the money more diversely and aggressively, analysts said, with the possibility of hundreds of billions of dollars being used to acquire 'strategic assets' — mines, oil fields, whole companies — around the world, especially in developing countries in Africa and Latin America.
'They’re not going to be looking for financial assets, but energy assets and natural resources, minerals, things China desperately needs,” said Jing Ulrich, an analyst at JPMorgan'"

What possible strategic benefit, for example, would China get from buying oil fields? Such a purchase certainly wouldn't allow the country to move the field to China. If China didn't purchase oil fields it could still buy the oil. Owning the oil fields wouldn't make it any cheaper for China to consume oil.

To see this assume that oil costs $100 a unit. If China doesn't own any oil fields it must pay $100 for each unit of oil it consumes. But if China does own oil fields then for every unit of oil China uses the nation gives up the opportunity of selling its oil for $100 a unit, thus the cost of consuming oil for China is still $100.

Finally, in the event of political turmoil in which countries were trying to deny China access to oil, it wouldn't matter who owned an oil field, but rather whether the country containing the oil field was hostile to China.