How long can China play the "rare earths card"?

This is probably the most important geopolitical question in the world right now: for how long can China play the “rare earths card”?

It’s now well established this gives China considerable leverage. For one thing the frantic state of panic of US Treasury Secretary Bessent over the past couple of days is a pretty big tell: he publicly insulted senior Chinese officials over the move, lobbied for “emergency powers” and said this was a Chinese attack on the “world” that would meet a “fulsome group response” from the U.S. and its allies. If that’s not Washington being rattled, I don’t know what is.

What seems to be the consensus view, because I’ve seen it mentioned over and over again, is that one of the main bottlenecks to break this rare earths stranglehold is environmental regulations. As the narrative goes, the West essentially regulated itself out of the rare earths business by imposing environmental standards that China simply ignored. And so, by implication, all it would take is the right regulatory changes and government subsidies and the problem is solvable within a few years or so, it’s mainly a question of political will to accept environmental trade-offs.

There is some degree of truth in that - rare earths processing can be very polluting - but this is otherwise very much magic bullet thinking.

The difficulty of breaking the rare earths stranglehold is far - FAR - more immense than mere regulatory adjustments. China’s dominance has much more to do with the scale of their manufacturing and the vertical integration of their supply chains, and as such breaking the stranglehold at this stage requires upgrading the West’s industrialization level comprehensively. We’re talking something requiring a complete makeover of the West’s socioeconomic structure, involving trillions in capital in investment - with profitability perhaps two decades away - as well as a profound upending of its education system. In short, a generational-level undertaking on an almost unprecedented scale.

You might be tempted to compare the efforts needed to the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program - that’s mighty enough, right? - but that would actually be vastly understating it. The amount of efforts needed is more comparable to something like the Industrial Revolution itself than to any individual megaproject.

You don’t believe me, right? Surely I must be exaggerating! No way it can be that dramatic!

That’s why I wrote this article. To show you in details the absolutely titanic efforts that would be needed to break the stranglehold for just one of the elements on China’s list of export controls: gallium. And bear in mind when you read the article that it’s just ONE chemical element out of 21 under export controls, and that China’s export controls don’t only include chemical elements but also downstream products (lithium-ion batteries, superhard materials, etc.)

After finishing this article, I bet Bessent’s panic will feel almost understated to you.