Highlights
- Keith Bradsher’s New York Times article chronicles China’s rare earth strategy, highlighting historical innovations in mineral extraction and processing.
- China’s rare earth dominance stems from organized industrial policy, strategic planning, and comprehensive supply chain development, not just low-cost production.
- The West faces critical challenges in rare earth mineral production, requiring integrated industrial policy, advanced recycling, and workforce development to compete globally.
In his recent dispatch from Baotou, Inner Mongolia, New York Times (opens in a new tab) veteran Keith Bradsher (opens in a new tab) attempts to chart the path of China’s rare earth dominance. He tells it as a tale of historical foresight and scientific tenacity. And to a point, he’s right. But by the time the last paragraph closes, the reader is left with a strangely flattened picture—historically textured but geopolitically hollow, technically informative but strategically inert.
This is no indictment of Bradsher’s craftsmanship. He has long been one of the most capable chroniclers of China’s industrial ascent. His recounting of Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms and the elevation of Fang Yi to spearhead a rare earth strategy is compelling.
Bradsher accurately highlights how Chinese scientists engineered cheaper rare earth separation using plastic vessels and hydrochloric acid—bypassing the West’s costly nitric acid and stainless steel route. He even credits Wen Jiabao, a geologist-turned-premier, as a long-range planner of China’s rare earth juggernaut. These are rare and welcome insights.
But for all its historical fluency, the article stumbles where it matters most: the present.
The author skirts the modern titans of China’s rare earth empire—China Rare Earth Group, Baogang Group—entities that form a vertically integrated supply chain from mine to magnet. Nor does it address China’s deft use of export quotas, strategic stockpiles, or foreign acquisitions. In Bradsher’s telling, China simply beat the West by being cheap and dirty. That’s a myth. The truth is more formidable—and more uncomfortable: China beat the West by being organized.
Bradsher tiptoes past the West’s strategic failures. He doesn’t mention how the U.S. allowed Mountain Pass to collapse in the early 2000s, or how European refineries shuttered under environmental pressure without substitutes. He ignores that the West today possesses neither separation capacity nor scaled magnet production, nor (at least not yet) the financial backbone to challenge China’s pricing power (A note the Big Beautiful Bill, formally known as the American Restoration and Reindustrialization Act, does offer a potential financial avenue for incremental advancement toward broader industrial revival).
And where is the conversation on recycling, remanufacturing, or industrial workforce development? What about the mass number of patents China accumulates as part of its Two Rare Earth Base China program? Nowhere. The article doesn’t touch the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act, the U.S. Defense Production Act, or the trilateral Japan-Korea-Australia supply pact. This is not a footnote. This is the rest of the story.
Worst of all, the article ends in 2010.
Rare Earth Exchanges™ (REEx) rates this article a 3.5 out of 5 for bias—not due to overt partisanship, but because of omission. It reads like a museum placard when what’s needed is a war map. We’re in a global industrial arms race for critical minerals, and the Times has wandered into the trenches with a history book and no compass.
Let investors be warned: China’s rare earth origin story isn’t just a tale of the past. It’s a warning shot for the future**.** Supply chains are not just made of ores and acids; they are built on policy, capital, and coordination, including the development of whole the labor force. The West will not regain ground by moralizing about pollution or reminiscing about cerium. It will require integrated industrial policy, magnet-to-magnet recycling, capital-market alignment, and an entirely new generation of metallurgists and process engineers. REEx was established to help catalyze and accelerate that essential transformation.
The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths.
The West has…a choice to make.
Visit www.rareearthxchanges.com (opens in a new tab) for strategic insights and live data across the global rare earth value chain. Check out the REEx Forum (opens in a new tab) to discuss projects. See the LREE/HREE Project/Deposit Ranking Database.
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