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The Chinese government has introduced a slew of new measures designed to tighten its grip on lucrative natural resources used in everything from electric cars to wind turbines. In a list released by the country’s State Council on Saturday, Beijing declared that rare earth metals are the property of the state and warned “no organization or person may encroach on or destroy rare-earth resources.” From Oct. 1, when the rules come into force, the government will operate a rare earth traceability database to ensure it can control the extraction, use and export of the metals. China currently produces around 60 percent of the world’s rare earth metals, and is the origin of around 90 percent of refined rare earths on the market. Advertisement

Beijing has already prohibited exports of rare earth refining and magnet manufacturing technologies. In January, it banned the export of gallium and germanium, both highly sought after by the computer-chip industry. Fears that China is looking to exert control over the industry, and could disrupt critical technology, automotive and renewable energy supply chains, have sparked a race to shore up supplies from alternative suppliers. Both the U.S. and the EU have launched efforts to procure rare earths at home and abroad, including in Vietnam, Brazil and Australia. A year ago, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced construction of the first large-scale rare earth refinery outside of Asia, located in Estonia. She said the move would “bolster European resilience and security of supply.”

A 2022 analysis from the European Parliament warned that over-reliance on monopolistic suppliers was a major risk for Europe. “The EU imports 93 percent of its magnesium from China, 98 percent of its borate from Turkey, and 85 percent of its niobium from Brazil. Russia produces 40 percent of the world’s palladium,” it said. “The latter is a reminder of the strategic implications of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the need for the EU to prepare for an increasingly uncertain world.”

The EU has launched a probe into anti-competitive trading allegations against the Chinese electric vehicle market, which benefits from heavy government subsidies and preferential access to essential rare earth metals. Earlier this month, the two sides agreed they would host consultations in order to try and resolve the standoff.

That last paragraph really is so damning. It is admitting the superiority of China’s central planning and how it is being used to actually improve society. ”But at what cost?”

Well, apparently the cost is that shares of China’s largest rare earth mineral mining firm have gone up 5% since the announcement. China proving socialists right every single day and absolutely crushing the capitalist development speedrun challenge. It’s genuinely hilarious that the development plan of China runs basically like what I’ll describe below, and capitalist nations are just completely incapable of stopping it from happening because the power of capital is greater than the power of their states.

porky-happy “hmmm yes, today I will invest in the Chinese rare earth mineral market. Since China controls 90% of global production and all of the infrastructure is in place, all I have to do is bring my money, tech, and expertise with me and I’ll carve myself some serious profit! Easy money!”

xigma-male “Ahh yes thank you for the help developing our mining industry/technology Mr. Foreign Capital. We appreciate your business and you had a great run, but unfortunately for you we have nationalized your mineral resources. The extractive capitalism will now stop. Feel free to reinvest elsewhere or compete with us on the global market tho :)”

porky-scared-flipped ”China is nationalizing its rare earth minerals, but at what cost? We need to ban China from–“

porky-happy ”Wait omg is that another investment opportunity in China where I can bring in my capital/technology/expertise to make some money? Hell yeah, where do I sign?”

Rinse and repeat

    • CoolerOpposide [none/use name]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      58·
      4 months ago

      It’s the exact same reason why Russia has been so difficult to sanction/restrict for western nations since the invasion of Ukraine.

      Financial sanctions work really well on countries who have no industry and are basically only in the business of ways to move money around. The west all sanctioned Russia and expected it to immediately collapse, except they forgot that they are only a small part of the world and that Russia is not only in the business of just moving money around and actually produces tangible goods.

      No matter how much you say “you can’t sell that here!” regarding a tangible good, somebody somewhere will buy it. The same applies to China for many, many examples, but most recently is the electric vehicle debacle. “Oh I can’t sell these in Europe or America? Whatever, I’ll just outcompete you elsewhere. Goodbye global market share.”

    • CoolerOpposide [none/use name]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      74·
      4 months ago

      15 years ago I genuinely wouldn’t have believed it but I’m happy to be proven wrong.

      All socialists thinkers ever who did any serious analysis came to the conclusion that capitalist development is largely unplanned beyond achieving profit, and operates nearly entirely unhindered by the state. China is just the first place to truly find a way to use this to its advantage. States where capital is the foremost power are utterly incapable of stepping in and stopping capital from doing the only thing it knows to do.

      • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        65·
        4 months ago

        Kinda gets into Marx’s idea of Capital as a “Real God.” Capital has alien intentions of generating profit, and the market will move in that direction regardless of the wills of individuals because the system requires it.

        • CoolerOpposide [none/use name]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          45·
          4 months ago

          Exactly. By carefully monitoring/pruning back capital and thus never allowing the power of capital to supercede the power of the state, you are put in a position where you can take advantage of capitalist development while never truly allowing it to gain a centralized chokehold over state power itself. You get to mitigate the most negative pieces of capitalist development while also getting to utilize all that it has already developed both domestically and in terms of the global market where, once integrated, there is no unified capitalist power which can (or would even want to) oppose your participation and continued development.

    • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      141·
      4 months ago

      This is absolutely great and all but can we not memory hole the past like 2 years of the CPC literally in bed with the current genocidal US admin? China is a country of contradictions, they have many great Ws and this is one of them.

      But I don’t think its particularly smart of fair to say this stuff when Yellen and Blinken have a permanent vacation home in Beijing almost where they’re always welcomed with open arms and “civility” despite all the genocide etc.

      I want to see results, preferably without looking like hypocritical fucks too. I believe they can do it.

      They can be praised for their Ws but we should not pretend they have been taking huge unnecessary Ls too.

      • RaisedFistJoker [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        26·
        4 months ago

        china manufactures key parts of us military hardware, this seems contradictory, until you realise this makes it impossible for america to ever go to war with china. China has succeeded because it is too important to try fell. China has succeeded because it is not the ussr

          • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            9·
            4 months ago

            That Yemeni dude was part of some forum China had organized with various Arab states. Like I said when that news dropped in the news megathread, he’s part of the nominal government of Yemen that holds no real power, which means nothing Wang says to him mean anything. There’s a reason why Ansarallah and Resistance media like Al Mayadeen didn’t bother covering this, let along condemn China and why the news was covered by Qatari mouthpiece Al-Jazeera.

      • iByteABit [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        4 months ago

        I don’t like the turn to neoliberalism of China one bit either but it seems to be working out now that the imperialists have fallen for it and lost all their means of production through capitalist means to China. If it weren’t for Dengism maybe China today would be just like Russia, a sad ruin of something that used to be great, but it’s not. It seems to be reaching a turning point and slowly giving capitalists the boot.

        I guess something similar would be the bourgeois revolutions that ended feudalism and the French Commune which got crushed because material conditions for socialism were far from ready. Capitalism is shit but it was necessary to get us to the point that proletarian revolutions were possible and led to the not so short lived success of the USSR.

        We can’t ignore the reasons that USSR was defeated though, it was because of strategic failures and the backtrack by giving in to capitalist measures but also because of being surrounded by hungry wolves in the West.

        Dengism seems to postpone the revolution until imperialist’s capital is stolen to the point that they are much less of a power to be reckoned with when revolution happens. If strict ML socialism is implemented at a point like this, it will probably be extremely more likely to defend itself and support global socialism until the US itself is also socialist.

        This is still progressing and only time will really tell if Deng was a genius revolutionary or a traitor. I’m really hoping it’s the first, it would mean that wherever you are, socialism might be coming soon enough to see it in our lifetimes.

        Morally it sucks but this is what material dialectisism teaches in part, morals aren’t the driving factor of history, only material conditions and relations of production are.

        • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          4·
          4 months ago

          I don’t like the turn to neoliberalism of China one bit either but it seems to be working out now that the imperialists have fallen for it and lost all their means of production through capitalist means to China. If it weren’t for Dengism maybe China today would be just like Russia, a sad ruin of something that used to be great, but it’s not. It seems to be reaching a turning point and slowly giving capitalists the boot.

          This is a perfectly fine point and its not what I’m arguing about. You can say Dengism does crucial important things while still recognizing the current mistakes and hypocrisy. They’re not mutually exclusive.

          Sadly people seem to very much want to have blind hope the same hypocritical dengism approach wont lead to even more crucial mistakes in the future. Its fine to hope for that, but not admitting their currently obvious flaws is just wrong imo.

      • Biggay [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        4 months ago

        Winning is the only true moral.

        Lenin even said it “Morality is subordinate to the class struggle.”

        Winning is the most important thing, would you have had China fight to stop the East Timor genocide, only to be destroyed? Or the Iraq War? We all want these things, China even makes the statements it can to signal these things, but it does not know if it can win. The USSR could fight, and it won some battles, but it died before it could challenge and destroy the bourgeoisie.

        • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
          5·
          4 months ago

          Winning is the only true moral.

          If we talk about Gaza, then saying Palestine is winning is straight up copium. They may eventualy win, some decades from now because Israel loses America support, but you go ask the survivors of this genocide if they give a shit about that and would rather not win today if they could, for example, count with a more broad support from the relevant supposedly enemies of America. Its like going back to 1975 and telling Palestinians back then “don’t worry, we’re not lifting a finger against Israel today but 50 years from now Israel will be destroyed”. Now look its 2025 and we’re still saying exactly that.

          would you have had China fight to stop the East Timor genocide, only to be destroyed?

          Oh my god why is this always the assumption? You are talking about the 3rd largest nuclear arsenal. The largest military, they can sink half the US navy with a dozen hypersonic missiles, they have thousands and thousands of modern 4th and 5th fighters, drones, bombers, a completely modern military far more efficient and capable than the current world imperialist powers. The largest commercial and military shipbuilding capacity in the world etc etc.

          But also smol bean China can’t even lift a finger against Israel because otherwise uncle sam comes to the SCS blockades them and 1 billion people die within a week. This is not realistic, this is a convenient excuse.

          Nobody is asking for China to do an amphibious assault on Gaza to stop Israel. Why is it that nobody acknowledges this? People are asking for the bare minimum anti-Israeli real world action like economic sanctions. China can do that, and no 1.4 billion people will not die because they stopped sending treats to Israel. This is insane.

          China will not be defeated because they stopped sending treats to Israel. This is embarassing to read. If a Democrat said America must support Israel otherwise America’s enemies will destroy it within a year you’d laugh at them and call them genocidal maniacs. Yet the reverse logic is used to say China can not only excuse themselves from geopolitics but keep supporting our global enemies and believe that unironically.

          In any case, while you can make that argument in favor of US-China relations, no you can’t make that argument over why China wont do anything against Israel, not even the bare minimal sanctions. You can rightfuly say but those minimal gestures wont stop Israel either and that would be fine. So what? People in the global south want and need real support, not excuses and rethoric.

          The USSR could fight, and it won some battles, but it died before it could challenge and destroy the bourgeoisie.

          This assumption that Dengism is winning because of token gestures and saying the right shit even though they repeatedly make contradictory decisions that cause real world harm is just dogmatic. China goes and says the thing we want to hear and then goes and does the exact opposite. China’s got more billionaires now than ever, the US is closer to war for Taiwan now than ever, the global leftist movement is weaker now than 5 or 10 years ago. BRICS embarassed themselves with Argentina etc.

          Its not to say China hasn’t done good things, I conceded that already. But I will push back against this blind narrative that China is winning overall and they shouldn’t be criticized for obvious mistakes that even calls into question their theoretical stance as Communists.

          I’ll give you one example. People on HB are traumatized by COVID still. How do you think most of the people here reacted when the CPC gave in and ended Zero COVID due to the protests? I imagine the same people that criticized China then would be facing backlash because clearly the CPC can do almost no wrong.

          I realy don’t understand why people suddenly refuse to hold the Communist party responsible for checks notes acting completely opposite to supposedly communist beliefs and ideology. People confuse support for Chinese Communism for support of Chinese Nationalism.

  • SacredExcrement [any, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    83·
    4 months ago

    Beijing has already prohibited exports of rare earth refining and magnet manufacturing technologies. In January, it banned the export of gallium and germanium, both highly sought after by the computer-chip industry. Fears that China is looking to exert control over the industry, and could disrupt critical technology, automotive and renewable energy supply chains, have sparked a race to shore up supplies from alternative suppliers.

    I wonder why they fucking did that, I’m sure it had nothing to do with the US trying to destroy their chip making segment by sanctioning them for it explicitly

    fuck-around

  • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    49·
    4 months ago

    Can’t wait to hear all the concern trolling about this pretty normal philosophy. No one made the natural resources so they all belong to the citizens of the community equally. It’s how botswana was able to start a solid recovery from colonialism.

  • ZeroHora@lemmy.mlEnglish
    33·
    4 months ago

    It wasn’t? As far I know in Brazil the state owns all natural resources, you need permission to extract anything. Probably something from colonial period that the Portuguese crown owns everything in my country.