China has stopped exporting rare earths to everyone, not just the U.S., cutting off critical materials for tech, autos, aerospace, and defense
China has stopped exporting rare earths to everyone, not just the U.S., cutting off critical materials for tech, autos, aerospace, and defense
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This is kind of interesting... China has been working on monopolizing sources of raw materials for awhile now, and putting them on the market cheap so that they become the de facto supplier, making it difficult or impossible for any other sources to be developed.
But... there are other sources of things like lithium and cobalt, it's just been cheaper to buy it from China so everyone does.
Cutting off the supply will cause some slow-downs and a bit of chaos in the short term but what will happen is local sources will suddenly become worth developing. What this does is effectively burn a big piece of China's economic power... I wonder what they're getting out of it right now? The impact won't last very long.
Neither lithium nor cobalt are rare earths, and China isn’t particularly dominating their production either. The leading producers are other countries. These are completely unrelated to the rare earths problem.
With rare earths the situation is that China isn’t only leading in production of the ores, but also in processing capacity, and the technology needed for it. The US already is the second largest producer of rare earth ores, but they still have to send them to China for processing because they can’t do all of it in the US. For the same reason, China produces ~90% of the world’s permanent magnets (these use rare earths like neodymium or samarium). Basically it’s not about developing sources for the ores. Rare earths are not that rare in the first place. It’s about the technology and capacity to do anything with them.
I do agree that the impact might not last long. They’re just forcing the competition to work faster. But maybe the explanation is that they think that making everybody speed up their rare earths development doesn’t change much in the long run anyway, while throwing a wrench into the US industry right now is a pretty good deal.
From research to large scale trials i would expect building the processing industry to take at the very least a few years. And once things are in place, China can just reopen the floodgates and give these new refiners a hard time, unless they are heavily protected by their government then.
So it requires a dedicated long term strategy to counteract, which will take some years. Also in the meantime all dependent industries are suffering big-time while China can still export the finished products and further strengthen their industries.
In terms of economical power this move is much stronger than Trumps tariffs and there is no rewards to be expected for countries who stick it out for the US. The US has already made it clear that it will just make you suffer more, the more you give in to them.
It's perfectly possible to do in the US, just costs a bit more. So, capitalism being what it is, that work got outsourced so the vultures could see higher numbers.
Is it possible to do in the US where most of the qualified people already do other jobs and a lot of the rest had the reading comprehension of a 6th grader before they had the brillant idea to abolish the department of education and remove funding from universities in other ways though?
All the brightest US minds to go McKinsey where they figure out how CEO's can buy even more yaghts*.
yaughts
Yachts.
Also fuck McKinsey.
Yep
throwing a wrench into the US industry right now is a pretty good deal.
This is the part I don't really get - they've spent decades working to control these resources, and I can't really see what benefit they get from this that offsets that time and effort.
Manipulating the flow and the prices makes sense. Cutting it off entirely just to participate in a dick-measuring contest with the US really doesn't make any sense. Nations are already looking at moving their supply chains especially for electronics after all the COVID disruptions. Encouraging those nations to go looking elsewhere for the entire supply chain just loses you business and influence, no matter how much short-term cost you inflict.
Why are you assuming they would be logical? They're a dictatorship
That kind of infrastructure takes time to build. Nobody wants to invest in something that will take years to start producing if there's a 50/50 chance that tomorrow Trump rolls over and China starts selling again within a month. It's too risky with how unstable the world market is right now.
They'll sell to Europe don't ya worry
