Every country wants green tech, electric cars, and cheap gadgets. But nearly all of this depends on minerals like lithium, nickel, copper. And China controls most of it. They buy mines everywhere, use government money to outbid others, and even let their companies lose money if it means locking up supplies for the future. They even run the factories that turn raw minerals into finished products
Fact: China processes 90%+ of the worlds rare earths (69% in mining production). For cobalt, lithium, copper, it is frequently more than half
Now Western countries (US, Europe, Australia, etc.) are worried. They talk about “friendship” and “safe supply chains”, but what are they really doing? Mostly, they throw money at big companies or make new trade groups, but still depend on China’s factories and technology
At the same time, local people in Africa, Asia, and South America are tired of outsiders (East or West) controlling their resources. Sometimes they just take over mines and switch partners
The world is rushing for more minerals, but we might just repeat old mistakes: dependency, pollution, debt, broken promises. Only this time, it’s not just oil, but everything from phone batteries to wind turbines
This is a very interesting topic but I think your summary overlooks one key point. While they might have started looking at other countries and companies to "lock down" the supply, many of the super rare minerals were actually extracted from within China itself. Either through quirks of geography that or because they were willing to create some very dirty industries in order to supply the demand. The fact that they were polluting their own land in order to extract and process a lot of these minerals, does give them a fair right to restrict how they get distributed. It also made them experts at understanding and improving the extraction of these key resources, while the rest of the world just sat around enjoying the end product - but now the price is going up
. as the Chinese juggernaut is learning some self respect