While many of these policies will certainly help the US/West in clawing back some magnet making capability, (not so sure about tariffs at this stage). Nobody other than REEx and a few Company specific public forums seem to be addressing China’s dominance in the Propaganda war.

Whenever a journalist needs some content on Rare Earths to pad out his Sunday paper’s adverts, he will google “Rare Earths”; and the first thing he sees will be “Rare earths are not rare….” which he immediately uses. The next thing that catches his eye will be numerous articles and commentary from the “Rare Earth Observer”. REO is a sideline of GITI, a Singaporean based purveyor of Chinese produced magnets. Upon reading a selection of REO articles, it becomes apparent that a majority of them are straight from the CCP’s Information Bureau and tell a story of Chinese dominance in all things Rare Earth. Many of REO’s other articles are sub-stack submissions from a serial detractor of all RE deposits, except Round Top and more recently Phalaborwa.

So why is “Propaganda” important? The first place that most Politicians get their strategic knowledge from is their Sunday papers. Consciously or not, Journalists of the fourth estate have been repeating Xi’s message for the last five years ie “It is too late, China already has its Monopoly”. The last thing your local Politician wants to get involved in is a race, that he has been told is already run (and lost).

While it is past the time for exposing how the West allowed itself to be lulled into this current situation. It would probably be advisable to re-educate the West’s media into exactly what the state of play is, and what our Politicians can do to save us from a future of Chinese Manufacturing dominance.