China’s most effective weapon in the rare earth war wasn’t a missile, a tariff, or a trade embargo.
China’s most effective weapon in the rare earth war wasn’t a missile, a tariff, or a trade embargo. It was a price tag.
For more than two decades, Beijing has used a remarkably simple strategy to maintain its stranglehold on the global rare earth supply chain: whenever a Western company would get serious about building an independent processing capability, China would act to crash prices. And the result is generally the same: the investment case falls apart, the funding disappears, and the company folds. China’s monopoly survives…