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China Now Halting Shipments of Rare Earth Minerals To US
blackraven14250 writes with news that China, after putting at least a temporary stop to rare earth exports to Japan, is now doing the same with exports to the US; according to the linked article, this is in response to recent US promises to investigate certain Chinese trade practices.
Nothing gets the American economy going like a good challenge..
Foreign companies invest in China. Then, China creates a Chinese alternative.. state-run.. state-subsidized.. copying the foreign model. Only.. China manipulates their currency for an export advantage. China keeps their middle class underpaid (while the government hordes money). And safety? Safety costs money.. Harming an American worker is more expensive than keeping him safe.. In China, harm a Chinese worker.. and replace him with one of the horde.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-LLsODnuHI
As American consumers, we pay less for cheap plastic crap now.. at the expense of our jobs and quality..
And Walmart leads the way.. fastest from store shelves to landfills.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
How could this possibly be modded interesting? Do you really wish to flog yourself to death? You know all those reasons why you couldn't just stop buying chinese goods for the last 5 years? Well, every single one of them still applies. The damage you would wreck upon yourself, especially in the short term would be orders of magnitudes greater than the damage caused by a rare earth metal shortage.
Perhaps if you suggested a more limited or symbolic ban/tariff then it may work.
But seriously, everyone knows by now that China and American are stuck. Breaking out of the current relationship would fuck both of you up. And China has way more slack than the US does to fuck around and be an abusive boyfriend. And everyone saw that coming to.
Do you subsidize your local business, or do you dump? What is happening in China is that they are doing BOTH. Keep in mind that China belongs to IMF and WTO. They have promised to do allow their money to float, to not subsidize general trade (though apparently key tech can be), and to not dump on the open market. China breaks all of those rules. Does Sweden? Nope.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Close our markets to all of China's exports.
You don't have to close our markets, just impose a 10% to 20% across the board import tariff on all manufactured goods.
Actually, we should take away their MFN (most favored nation) trading status. They never deserved it in the first place.
The US and the rest of the world can not be held hostage by economic terrorism from China.
Really, must everything the US doesn't like be called terrorism? China refusing to sell us every product we want may be many things, but terrorism it isn't.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Am I way off here or should we not be keeping these rights?
Can anyone enlighten me if I am missing something since IANAG.
Yes. You are way off. The mineral rights reside with the Afghan people and their government.
Essentially what they are doing is what we we (as in West) have been doing to China and still doing to many other developing countries for about a century. We're still doing it in most agricultural products, dumping so that local farmers in Africa can't really compete unless they play ball.
The issue isn't protectionism. It's that this is really the first time that West actually got the taste of same medicine, and same arguments to back the medicine, as it was giving to developing countries for centuries. Chinese have watched what we did, learned, and simply copied our actions. And now, we're finding that in the raw, brutal, jungle-law "only strongest and most ruthless survives" style of globalisation we created, we may not be the only top dogs. And that realisation is so shocking to many of the elite, they're clearly in denial. Mostly because they simply believe in the system they created on religious level, and when the system is turned against them, they are unable to see the bigger picture. So we get the "oh noes, China is being protectionist" tears from top leaders. Never mind that we did the same thing for centuries, when China does it, it's deeply wrong. Not because system is deeply flawed, but because it's not the West that is the party in control.
It's not even that it's somehow irreplaceable. There is a centuries-worth of rare earths across both Northern American and Europe. It's just that we're so used to being the ones using globalisation as a hammer to beat the nail of competition into the ground, we are simply stumped as to what we are supposed to do when we become the nail that is getting hammered instead. A hundred years of being the hammer makes us a pretty bad nail.
Joke's on you, China!
We don't manufacture anything anymore!
Do you have ANY idea what this would mean? It's not just the Walmarts of the world that deal with China.
I run a very small company - just a couple of geeks in a little office/warehouse. We do enough business for both of us to pay the rent and put food on the table, with the occasional mention in Make or hackaday as a side benefit. We take pride in doing as much of our work domestically as we can and sourcing locally whenever possible, but I can tell you we wouldn't last 3 months without trade with China.
Global supply chains are far too interconnected for something so drastic. When the economy tanked in 2008, despite the fact that we still had plenty of orders coming in we almost went under when we couldn't get the parts we needed. Even when *our* suppliers were OK, if one of *their* suppliers was in trouble we felt it.
People seem to have this weird idea that there's some sort of China, Inc. that just sits over there on the other side of the Pacific building plastic widgets to cram down our throats via Walmart. That's not how it works. China's far from blameless, but "close our markets to Chinese exports" is right up there with "nuke Baghdad" for brilliant foreign policy.
It's hardly the first time. Every major manufacturing, farming, and mining economy in the world does this to some extent: the quesiton is how much, and whether nations follow their treaties about it. Look carefully at the history of OPEC to see where the "West got the taste of their own medicine", and at the history of gold trading and spice trading for the last several thousand years.
Rare earths, despite the name, aren't. Go look it up, there are plenty of them, and the US has plenty to be had. They aren't mined much in the US because China is cheaper since they don't care about safety. Ok fine, but that doesn't mean they can't or won't be mined again in the US if there's a reason. China refuses to trade, the US just starts up production. Prices may rise some but that is ok, believe it or not a market can absorb that just fine (just look to the increase in gas, it wasn't without problems but it near tripled in the period of a few years and life goes on).
Now China could wind up in a much worse situation, if they keep the game up and people aren't willing to trade. Their economy is heavily based on foreign trade and lacking that it could have a nasty downturn, which could cause massive unrest. The government's problems/abuses are largely overlooked because of the massive quality of life improvements going on. If those stop, could go bad for them.
Also there's the fact that despite the hype you see on /. the US DOES in fact build things, it turns out more manufactured goods than any other nation (though China is on track to surpass it in 2020 or so). More to the point, America builds a lot of high tech and important shit. Computer processors, heavy machinery, airplanes, etc. In the event of a trade freeze, China would probably find itself on the worse end of it. Cheap consumer goods are nice, but hardly necessary and that is a large amount of what China builds (and many of those goods are simply assembled of foreign parts to foreign specs). Heavy equipment and computer chips are a little more important to continued progress.
Now in the case of war, the US could unquestionably wage war against China if they felt dumb enough. However China cannot against the US. There is a massive ocean in the way and China has no blue water navy. They cannot project the force necessary, and cannot deal with the US intelligence abilities (like recon satellites and IUSS). They could load up container ships with massive amounts of soldiers and tanks, which they have in abundance, all of which would rest at the bottom of the ocean shortly after sailing.
So I don't find war over this a very realistic scenario. Not a good idea still, but not likely to result in war.
Considering that the US needs China to buy its public debt,
China doesn't have to buy US debt. Especially if commodities start trading in something other than US dollars. After all, why the hell would you support the dollar today? The interest rate sucks, the US government is spending more than ever before, and the US economy (which has been in the tank for a while now) continues to struggle. Plus add this to the fact that US banks have no idea who they have loaned money to - no, there are far wiser places to put your money today than US treasury notes. In fact, almost anywhere BUT US T-bills will get you a better return.
The US is in for a very, very rude awakening in my opinion. Gross incompetence has been demonstrated on both a government, military and economic level. I'm just glad I don't live there.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This is america bitch.
We'll build a fucking nailgun.
In what factory, you jingoist ignorant fuck?!
Thanks for perfectly illustrating why we are in this situation. "This is America!" is a meaningless phrase. You didn't do shit when they busted the unions. You didn't do shit when the easier jobs were shipped over there. You didn't do shit while the Congress continued to cut taxes for corporations so they could sell us out. You just sat there, with that smug look on your face, saying "Yeah boy! This is America! We believe in the Market, not in that damn Government interference. Why pay more for TV set? That's stupid, when we can all just put it on a credit card for half the price."
Do me a fucking solid favor. Go find the largest object you can imagine shoving up your ass, and then sit on it. Because it's a good primer on what the next thirty years is going to be like for you.
I'd like to nominate this for the Best Reply of the Year award.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
This is america bitch.
"This is America!" is a meaningless phrase. You didn't do shit when they busted the unions. You didn't do shit when the easier jobs were shipped over there. You didn't do shit while the Congress continued to cut taxes for corporations so they could sell us out. You just sat there, with that smug look on your face, saying "Yeah boy! This is America! We believe in the Market, not in that damn Government interference. Why pay more for TV set? That's stupid, when we can all just put it on a credit card for half the price."
Best. Post. Ever.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Well, the US should, as a response, stop shipments of garbage abroad.
Start processing electric junk at home to recycle rare earth and precious metals.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Yes, the EPA & OSHA are out to punish businesses for being successful, it has absolutely nothing to do with the externalities of the manufacturing process. If it's profitable to turn entire mountain ranges into mesas, or choke every living thing in a large river with hydraulic mining sediment or casually let workers be maimed by machinery or otherwise make a few little messes, we should do it!
We tried letting business do anything without restriction, then around 1900 decided there's a better way. China will do the same or they won't have anyone left healthy enough to work. Do you seriously not see the barrel we're racing to the bottom of?
Neither should the US.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
The US does exactly the same thing in the agriculture sector.
So I entirely agree, so long the US gets kicked out as well.
1) Don't allow imports from anyone who doesn't have a certain standard for environmental and labor laws.
2) Wow, that was easy.
3) By the way... We have less stuff now. But we have more wildlife. It was a tradeoff, but I'd support making it.
Sure. The EPA does a good (if sometimes possibly a little extreme) job of protecting our air and water. I think that's fantastic and wonderful! But the result is that we turn around and buy stuff from horrible polluting factories overseas that have people working in unsafe conditions, etc, but who can, by virtue of destroying their own people and environment, make stuff much more cheaply than we can.
What we need is to have protective tariffs on imports from such, so that the price of building clean factories does not render them totally unprofitable. Same deal with human rights abuses abroad. If the abuses are making their exports cheaper, then we either need to allow the same sort of abuses here so we can compete, or artificially raise the prices of the imports so we can compete without abusing our people.
You simply can't have one without the other.
Bad analogy: The Ivy League mostly plays itself in football. If Ivy League teams with tough academic requirements on their athletes were to try to play against the Ohio States and Texases of the country, they would get creamed, and everyone would say "haha, why are you losing?". So they mostly only play other teams with similar academic requirements. If they could, I'm sure that they'd love to play against Oregon, but with the restriction that only Oregon's players that met Ivy League academic standards would be allowed on the field. Obviously they can't do this. As a sovereign nation that can lay down rules for what goes in and out of the country, we can do this.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Of course you can compete, by levying tariffs on the guy who is using destructive business practices.
We could restart all of America's manufacturing facilities if our trade policies were just a little more isolationist -- which would be in line with how foreign countries treat our goods.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.