Xi Jinping is countering Trump’s demands with demands of his own, and China’s got the muscle to back him up. From Hua Bin at unz.com:
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander
Last week, the vassal governor of Australia Anthony Albanese went to the imperial court in Washington and paid tribute to King Trump in the form of a “landmark deal” for joint mining of Australian rare earth deposits. The goal is to break China’s stranglehold on these critical minerals.
Trump, in his indefinite stupidity, immediately declared that “in about a year, we will have so much critical mineral and rare earths that you won’t know what to do with them”.
In Trump’s peanut-sized brain, “deal making” seems conflated with “engineering”. The mere fact of announcing a deal somehow automatically translates into factories, workers, and products.
The real world doesn’t quite work that way.
I don’t know who serves as King Trump’s court advisor on technical matters but anyone who can read the decidedly non-technical Wall Street Journal or Washington Post is able to tell you that having access to some rare earth deposits does not equate to overcoming Beijing’s rare earth export restrictions.
After all, you cannot use rare earth ore to make precision-guided missiles.
Trump’s delusional optimism is akin to some bureaucrat in Beijing announcing China has overcome US semiconductor ban because China has the world’s largest production of silicon (which it does).
Rare earth deposits are not the same as rare earth alloys and magnets – just like silicon is not the same as silicon chip.
Sophisticated processing and refinement are needed to turn raw minerals into usable industrial products – “the vitamins for high tech”.
The US and its vassals control many critical technologies that turn silicon into silicon chips, such as chip design software, chip making machinery, and foundries.
Similarly, China controls the critical technologies involved in the mining, extraction, separation, chemical leaching, refining, alloying and magnet production in the rare earth supply chain.
The Hebrew Yammer wrestling outfit comes to mind.
The yellow man is not a noticer or they are already in the land of workers utopia?