At present, about 80 percent of the world’s production of rare earths comes from China. . . . While the United States once led the world in rare earth production, we now import the vast majority of these minerals from China. The loss in mining jobs is bad enough, but the extreme concentration in the field means that China essentially controls the world’s access to a vital industrial and military resource.
Free-market conservatives confronted with a situation like this one usually laud the efficiency gained by trade and competition. They are not completely wrong: it is more efficient to have third-world workers in an unfree country mining hazardous materials. Mining is a dirty, dangerous job: why not let someone in a country with terrible environmental laws and lax workplace safety rules do it?
If rare earths were only used for toys and video games, that might be a financially acceptable albeit morally dubious answer. The military applications, though, make this a much bigger problem. Once China achieved a near-monopoly on rare earths, their position was ripe for abuse.
And, wouldn’t you know it, they abused it. Between 2009 and 2012, China drastically reduced its export of rare earths and two other important metals, tungsten and molybdenum. In a free economy, that would encourage production in sources outside of China, where the artificial scarcity Beijing imposed would make it worthwhile to produce at higher prices.
But when Red China is involved, the economy cannot be called free. Mike Fredenburg explained what happened next in a 2017 National Review article:
In 2012, U.S.-based Molycorp, attracted to the higher prices that resulted from the Chinese government’s efforts to boost profits by restricting REE [i.e., rare earth elements] exports, made plans to ramp up domestic REE production, investing nearly $800 million in state-of-the-art mining operations in California. At the moment when the project was poised to succeed, China flooded the market with REEs just long enough to knock Molycorp out of the market. After its Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, Beijing is allowing Molycorp to continue operations in China. But once again, the U.S. has no domestic REE production.
This anti-competitive behavior in a domestic company would earn an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In the international economy, the American government’s options were more limited. The Obama administration, joined by Japan and the European Union, filed a complaint against China in the Dispute Settlement Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
America won its case, but the Molycorp mine in California was still bankrupt. In 2017, the rare-earth mining assets were sold to a consortium of buyers that includes Shenghe Resources Holding Company, a Chinese firm with ties to the PRC’s government, according to mining executives quoted in IndustryWeek. The Chinese government broke the rules of the WTO and still came out on top.
