News on China's scientific and technological development.
- Thread starter Quickie
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You need to be far more specific to get useful answers. What are the precise benchmarks you are going by?
- The ability to mine rare earths? They have that already, contingent on various legal or environmental frameworks.
- The scale to mine the same quantities of rare earths as they are importing? Will take X years to build up that scale.
- The technology to refine rare earths? They have some of it already, but in more primitive form than Chinese versions.
- LREE vs HREE deposits? Some of the former, few of the latter. Many are suspected or not confirmed deposits.
- Which countries? US soil only? US ownership only? US allies? Any and all non-China?
And so on. Blanket answers are wrong by definition, because it's a complex problem with many different facets.
Yeah, but this one is a do or die affair for them, the others they can still muddle through without but if China cuts off rare earth they can barely produce any of their critical high tech products which is crucial for their industry and economy
People grossly under-estimate the value of 25 years of Chinese RE process patents and talk as though technology is optional, or that US has those technology.
Even if Americans violate patent law (and they 100% will), the technology behind those patents aren't something you can replicate in any useful amount of time, especially if you also don't have anyone with expert knowledge now that China banned anyone from assiting.
China didn't start building self reliance in semiconductors in 2018, China started decades ago and built a massive talent base, 2018 was just a kicker. Asking America to build RE is more like asking China circa 1990 to build leading edge nodes
They're not treating this as a do or die affair; at least not yet. All they're doing is talking about it as if it's an easily solved problem. Besides, who's going to be doing all the hard work of recreating the rare earths industry? The government? Don't make me laugh. Private companies? It's going to take a lot of investment, and there won't be any returns at all for at least a decade. It's a terrible ROI, so why would anyone be interested?
Yes, that's another factor worth adding to the list. With sufficient political motivation, US can establish protected markets for inferior producers. They will most likely try to do so for military applications. But the limited scale and output means they cannot compete commercially against Chinese producers on the open market. Unlike the Chinese market which has huge demand from downstream manufacturing, US economy is far more constrained in that regard.
Well there is human will and there is material reality, and material reality trumps human will every time.
We're likely looking at a range of different timelines for different RE elements instead of a single date. Some of those that the west has a tiny existing refinement base, it is matter of expanding the operation in orders of magnitude; Some of those the west has zero capacity for and need to basically start from scratch.
So in the best cases we're talking about first expanding production lines for refinery machineries followed by expanding refinery capacity, maybe 5 years is possible. In the worst cases we're talking about designing refinery machineries from scratch, even if they're violating Chinese IP and outright copying Chinese equipments it will take a lot of time testing and debugging. Then they put those newly designed machineries into production at a large scale then followed by building the actual refineries and training the personals to operates them properly. A decade is wildly optimistic, you can simply look at how long it takes China to build up it's own capacity and ask yourself if the west can do it faster.
All this is assuming the west does everything right which they won't. Take a look at Arizona TSMC plant, that is with 100% Taiwan support and Taiwan sending engineers over and with off the shelf equipment's and so on.
Private companies won't even try because they know China can always flood the market again like swinging a sword of damocles. The government may promise captive market but I won't trust them if I am an investor, western government changes policy like they change clothes.