Salon.com > Rare earth elements

China’s crazy U.S. rare earth blockade

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 20:17:00 +0000

The New York Times is reporting that, as of Monday, China has started blocking shipments of rare earth minerals to the United States. As HTWW readers are by now well aware, rare earth minerals are crucial to the manufacture of clean energy technology products and strategically sensitive military hardware, but China currently has a near-total monopoly on their production.

If true, China's move is flabbergasting. In the present politically charged climate of U.S.-China relations, it is hard to imagine a more provocative gesture. If China wanted to prove that it is indeed, as Paul Krugman charged in his column on Monday, a "rogue economic nation," this is exactly how to go about it. I can't think of a better way to gin up bipartisan U.S. support for punitive tariffs against Chinese products than to engage in a selective blockade of rare earth minerals, mere weeks after attracting scads of negative attention for wielding exactly the same kind of heavy handed trade policy against Japan. The kindling necessary for a hot-burning trade war is already piled up and ready. China just threw a match on it.

Longtime readers of HTWW know that I have regularly tried to steer a middle course on China, much to the dismay of some of my commenters. But as John Maynard Keynes famously noted, "when the facts change, I change my mind." I cannot begin to understand China's motivations in pursuing this course -- right after a major meeting of the Chinese Communist Party's leadership.

This is bad news.

Panda squashes ninja; Prius saved

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 14:25:00 +0000

Whether or not China officially halted exports of rare earth elements to Japan in retaliation for the imprisonment of a Chinese fishing captain is now irrelevant. Japan has buckled. There is no other way to interpret the following statement.

From the Wall Street Journal:

"We decided it was inappropriate to continue the investigation while keeping the suspect in custody any further, considering the future of the Japan-China relationship," said Kenji Suzuki, a senior prosecutor at the Naha prosecutors' office in Okinawa, a hastily called news conference Friday afternoon.

China takes the Prius hostage

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 14:51:00 +0000

Never mind all those panda-semen-extraction-gone-wrong conspiracy theories. If the New York Times' ace China correspondent Keith Bradsher is to be believed, China has has halted exports of rare earth elements to Japan, in protest of its neighbor's detention of a Chinese fishing boat captain.

A spokesman for China's Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economics is denying that any such trade embargo exists, but Bradsher's article makes a convincing case that some kind of message has come down from on high to restrict the flow of minerals. Regular readers of HTWW will understand the significance of the move. Rare earth elements play an extraordinarily important role in the high tech, clean energy economy -- as well as advanced military technology such as missile guidance systems.

How G.M. helped China to world magnet domination

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:32:00 +0000

Can't get enough of those rare earth elements! David Cay Johnston, former New York Times reporter and ace exposer of tax law shenanigans, writes in to remind HTWW that chapter four of his book, "Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You With The Bill)," includes the interesting, if disturbing, story about how China ended up with a monopoly on the neodymium-boron magnet industry.

(Readers will recall that neodymium is one of the rare earth elements that the United States no longer has the capacity to process. Neodymium magnets are used in computer hard drives, smart bombs, wind turbines, and hybrid car engines.)

Once upon a time, the U.S. did make neodymium magnets. A subsidiary of General Motors called Magnequench pumped them out, and employed 260 people to do so.

The rare earth element big squeeze

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 21:47:00 +0000

If a conservative is a liberal who just got mugged, then an advocate of government intervention in the economy is nothing more than a free market believer who just realized that China dominates an industry with major implications for national defense and renewable energy technology.

That's the primary conclusion to be gleaned from a review of three recent studies of Chinese dominance of rare earth element mining and processing, "Rare Earth Elements: The Global Supply Chain," a report published by the Congressional Research Service in July, the Government Accountability Office's "Rare Earth Materials in the Defense Supply Chain," published in April, and China's Rare Earth Elements Industry: What Can the West Learn?" published by the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in March.

Does the Prius have an Achilles heel?

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:06:00 +0000

"Just A Grunt" at the previously unknown-to-me blog, JammieWearingFool, seems perversely delighted to learn that the Prius depends on a class of rare earth elements for its battery technology. The fact that 90 percent of the world's production of such rare earth elements currently comes from China, and the commissars may (or may not) be thinking of restricting their export for domestic strategic reasons, leads to some chortling over the possibility that "making hybrid vehicles which run on electricity... may prove to be a dead end or at least a very costly one."