China and Japan Covet the Same Rare-Earth Metals

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from The Australian: "Japan's increasingly frantic efforts to lead the world in green technology have put it on a collision course with the ambitions of China and dragged both government and industry into the murky realm of large-scale mineral smuggling."

Comments

Re:Great!

[TubeSteak]

1) China's government is trying to lock up rare earth metals so that they can profit off of it politically. Since these are used in green technologies, this is bad environmentally.

China is going to profit off of it economically.
They have been pursuing a decades long mineral aquisition policy. And they're beating the USA.
Capitalism just can't compete with (Chinese) government financed companies.
Who in their right mind wouldn't want to do everything in their power to monopolize a limited natural resource?

You don't even really know that it's bad for the the environment... yet.
If it makes sense, someone will break the monopoly. More on this later.

2) This isn't really affecting the market, because there's a huge black market for the stuff. As shown by drugs, Prohibition, embargoes... black markets usually breed a lot of crime.

I'm not sure you make sense.
"not really affecting the market" and "huge black market" are contradictory.
Not to mention that black markets are by definition illegal; claiming that they breed crime is tautological.

1) "Ginya Adachi, from the Japanese Rare Earth Association, said that China's dominance of rare earths would serve the developed world with a rude shock about global trade: Japan, America and Europe must now realise that some markets are not real, but political."

Pure hyperbole. China's lock on rare earth metals isn't recent news. They've had it for >20 years.
And there are dozens of markets whose prices are set because of political considerations.
If I wanted to be pedantic, I could argue that every tariff and subsidy qualifies.

Last but not least, that article was shit.
It leaves out tons of back story and doesn't even mention why people are talking about this again.
1. An Australian group called "Lynas" couldn't get the funding to build a refinery in Malaysia or develop a new mine in Australia until they sold 51% of their ownership to China for 500 Million.
2. A Chinese invesment company just bought 25% of a major Australian rare earth mining corp

Looks like this strategic resource isn't all that strategic since nobody is willing to fork over the cash to build refineries outside of China, without Chinese cash.
Maybe Canada will since they're pretty much the only player left.