If you drive a hybrid or an electric vehicle (EV), fly on a modern jet, or expect American weapons to hit their targets, you owe thanks to a small group of elements known as heavy rare earths.For more than a decade, China has been the world’s near-sole supplier.
Last year, Beijing shut that door to Western defense companies.Here is my prediction: it is not going to reopen for any industry in the West.Some Western leaders keep treating each new Chinese export restriction as a bargaining chip — leverage to be traded for the right concession at the right summit.That is the wrong way to read what is happening.
China is methodically executing a long-term economic and military plan to stop shipping these materials abroad altogether.It intends to send us Chinese-made EVs, wind turbines and robots built with dysprosium and terbium — not the oxides themselves.Who would blame them? Keeping the entire mine-to-magnet-to-manufacturer chain inside China preserves jobs and stability at every link.
For the Chinese Communist Party, maximizing employment and minimizing internal dissent is Job No.1.
Denying Western militaries the inputs they would need in a fight over Taiwan, for example, is an added bonus to Beijing.THE CCP CONTROLS THE MOST INTIMATE ELEMENTS OF OUR LIFE.MOST AMERICANS HAVE NO IDEAWheel loaders fill trucks with ore at the MP Materials rare earth mine in Mountain Pass, Calif.
Jan.30, 2020.
(Steve Marcus/Reuters)The economic logic is the part Western policymakers need to internalize most.A kilogram of dysprosium shipped abroad as a powder earns China a few hundred dollars and employs a handful of miners.
The same kilogram, tucked inside the motor of an electric car, helps roll a $40,000 vehicle off a Chinese assembly line.It also employs millions of Chinese workers, from the mine to the smelter to the magnet plant to the auto factory.Multiply that across the seven million vehicles China will export this year, plus its wind turbines, drones, MRI machines a...