China adding around 300K barrels a day in refining capacity will reduce their current imports of refined products, but means little about the state or direction of demand growth generally.
China's oil import numbers have held steadier than other economic metrics mostly because they've just built a strategic reserve and are working on filling it up, now, while prices are low. Another month or two and that large new source of demand will abruptly end... and you'll see a sudden big drop in China's oil imports... probably in April.
We're still much closer to the (artificially stimulated) peaks than we are close to the bottoms in most markets. Commodities prices, however, and commodity stocks... aren't lying to you about the state of real demand growth versus the pace of growth in the supply pipeline. The rest of the economy... really can't continually
"outperform" the markets that provide the physical things everything else depends on... indefinitely. Like falling oil prices have, although they are a special case, falling commodity prices have provided something of a longer term "cushion" to reduce the some of the $ impact on the economy of declining demand growth. But, that "cushion" has a fairly short half life... and, eventually, either other markets will deflate to match in line with the commodities... or there will be a major inflation in commodities as required to have them match the obvious excesses in the rest of the economy, on a price basis.
None of that is good news. We're probably approaching real limits in the ability of "stimulus" to sustain the fiction that the manipulation of financial asset prices can be a real substitute for actually sound economic policy.
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