Chinese Economics Thread

Tam said:

Wait till they get all that stuff that mining and processing rare earth elements are very very bad for the environment, like for your city, your county, your state. Like to see how the activists, environmentalists, and the lawyers pounce on that.

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Yes and the techniques they claim in the video are cleaner than how China does it still makes them doing it more expensive. So this is all private entities hoping that their governments subsidized domestic industry so they can make money. China can easily make it cost them more by flooding the market with cheap rare earths. They also claim most rare earths are processed outside China. Processing is the most expensive part. Even Molycorp who claims they have rich domestic rare earth deposits ships the unprocessed ore to China to be processed. The interview I saw of the new owners said they were expecting the US government to help process them domestically aka subsidies.

I would put a difference between mining and processing rare earths for a profit and producing them for war effort and during a time of crisis. That is what is troubling strategic planners in the US the most.
Subsidizing a company in a critical industry is more common than one might think, heck China does it all the time. The only reason why it's such a big fuzz is that it is literally anathema in the US.

Tam said:

Wait till they get all that stuff that mining and processing rare earth elements are very very bad for the environment, like for your city, your county, your state. Like to see how the activists, environmentalists, and the lawyers pounce on that.

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The US is keeping the resources at Mountain Pass for future emergency as rare earths are strategic materials. China is supplying the whole world but these are China diminishing resources selling at dirt cheap.

The US even get Australia which has some of these resources to supply them, while refusing to use their own. US is having a long strategic plan.

And Australia is processing these rare earth in a small country, Malaysia, to the disgust of the locals.

Tam said:

Wait till they get all that stuff that mining and processing rare earth elements are very very bad for the environment, like for your city, your county, your state. Like to see how the activists, environmentalists, and the lawyers pounce on that.

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It is not unless you lack good processing tech. Idk if US has it tho.

Biscuits said:

It is not unless you lack good processing tech. Idk if US has it tho.

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That's the thing.

Its not about the monopoly of rare earth mining and production themselves.

Its about the monopoly of rare earth patents for separation and refining, along with recycling and processing of waste.

China alone has 26,000 patents related to rare earths and keeps adding to that every year more than the rest of the world combined.



China’s war chest of rare earth patents give an insight into total domination of the industry

• US lobbyists lament the lack of a governmental effort to cut reliance on Chinese supply of elements widely used in consumer electronics and military equipment
• China had filed for 25,911 rare earth patents compared to 9,810 from the US as of October last year

The number of Chinese patents filed on rare earths has jumped since 2011, accounting for more than half its accumulated total and more than double that of the rest of the world combined.

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This is a much bigger advantage in patent numbers than Huawei and ZTE has combined over strategic 5G competitors.

In addition to all that, China has a domination in processing and refining strategic elements such as Cobalt and Gallium. Its a technological dominance spread to other elements.

Jul 16, 2019

Jura said:

Jun 2, 2019
now
Social credit system to set market access limit for dishonest individuals, firms
Source:Global Times Published: 2019/7/16 21:38:42

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a new article related to what I've been following here for 3+ years now is
China to offer grace period to discredited individuals: SPC
so follow the link

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if interested

Chish said:

The US even get Australia which has some of these resources to supply them, while refusing to use their own. US is having a long strategic plan.

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China's rare earth reserves are more than ten times the size of Australia's.

According to , China has 44 million tonnes of reserves; Australia, only 3.4 million tonnes. The U.S. has 1.4 million tonnes.

Having the reserves (or some access to them) is the easy part. The hard part is refining the rare earths. Most deposits have all 17 of these elements jumbled together; separating them isn't easy. ; the only other large refiner, Lynas of Malaysia, handles only 12%.

In addition, the same article says China has 100 PhDs working on rare earths; the rest of the world, zero. So China's rare earth technology will likely stay far ahead.

So you can see that China can continue to underprice the rest of the world for a long time.

@Nutrient
I rarely do this but... are there any new developments within China to exploit the mineral wealth of the Himalayan and Tibetan regions? Are they avoiding these regions due to costs of extracting the resources and the difficulties involved (high altitude and terrain) ? Also... any reliable future assessments/output charts of Chinese crude output? What is the quality of crude extracted from the Inner Mongolia/Gobi regions of China?
Thank you.