Pascale Massot
China is the dominant player in global critical minerals supply chains, especially in the midstream segments. The country controls, on average, two-thirds of the production or refining of major critical minerals such as lithium, graphite, cobalt, nickel, copper, and rare earth elements and above 90 percent for the latter. In 2022,
the United States was more than 50 percent import dependent on 51 mineral commodities. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), China was the leading supplier for 17 of these and ranked among the top three sources for 24.
The U.S. was caught “sleeping at the wheel” – and it was not alone. Western governments have found themselves staring at the China challenge from the vantage point of decades of open-market-driven minerals procurement policy. Since the last quarter of the 20th century and until very recently, the neoliberal globalization paradigm in the West left to market forces the task of fulfilling critical mineral security objectives.
This led to decades of internationalization, financialization, and global supply chain reconfiguration to align with profit motive and shareholder value maximization. In parallel, labor, environmental, civil society, and indigenous rights considerations continued to improve, a positive development that has also compounded the delocalization incentives of mining and refining industries. [...]
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