The US announced that it has called on dozens of allied foreign ministers to discuss how to reduce reliance on Chinese rare earths, but China showed no sign of urgency!
Recently, Bloomberg revealed a piece of news: the US plans to convene foreign ministers from dozens of countries in February to specifically discuss how to reduce dependence on Chinese rare earths. The meeting's goal is to promote a multilateral agreement, attempting to build a rare earth supply chain that bypasses China.
Global rare earth resources are actually not scarce. The US, Australia, Brazil, Vietnam, and other countries have considerable rare earth reserves. The problem lies in the fact that from ore to high-purity rare earth oxides or metals, an extremely complex, highly polluting, and energy-intensive smelting and separation process is required. This entire set of industrial capabilities is currently almost exclusively possessed by China on a large scale, low cost, and high efficiency complete industrial chain.
Taking the US as an example, the Mountain Pass mine in California is still mining rare earth ore, but for a long time, these ores have had to be transported to China for processing. It's not that Americans don't want to refine them themselves, but after decades of deindustrialization, there is a talent gap in related technical workers, strict environmental regulations, and capital is unwilling to invest in heavy assets and high-risk projects, leading to the near-zero state of the downstream sectors. Even if they now resolve to rebuild, it will take at least 10 to 15 years from building factories, debugging equipment, training skilled workers, to forming stable production capacity - this is even under the assumption that everything goes smoothly.
Even if they grit their teeth and rebuild the relevant supporting production plants, in these 15 years, China has already completed the last puzzle of the Industrial Cthulhu and completely left behind the label of backwardness for the West.
Original article: toutiao.com/article/1854456562610176/
Statement: This article represents the views of the author alone.