Rare Earth Metals: China’s ‘Nuclear Option’ In The Trade War

Oil Price ^ | 05/25/2019 | By Tsvetana Paraskova

[yawningotter]

The weakness of the PLA is the reliance on conscripts to fill out the ranks. As with most armed forces that rely on compulsory service, the time of enlistment is not long enough to properly train those conscripts, and in China’s case, about half of the available training time is dedicated to Party doctrine, and not military skills. Does China have enough career people in the PLA to operate key systems, or will they be relying on draftees who have only learned Chinese Marxism in their training?

[vette6387]

I think, at the end of the day, all China has is sabre rattling. Xi has his tit in a wringer and he knows it. That’s why he had his stooges bail on the trade talks. His hold on power is tenuous, and he knows that too many concessions to the US on trade ( which is their master plan to cheat and steal their way to being #1 in the world) an he’s out.

[GOPJ]

Japan has the mother-load... While Trump’s over there he should make a serious deal with them and store some of their cache over here..

[Engraved-on-His-hands]

Yes. AMY in Canada. AMYZF in the US.

[Svartalfiar]

4. All China is going to do with the “nuclear option” is to slightly raise the price of rare earth metals and lose their entire market

So it will definitely take us longer to get spooled up, but rare earths and China is just like oil and OPEC. You do enough dumb shit and the US will just open the floodgates.

[sphinx]

China can feed its people. China has been feeding a lot of people for a long time. It is the world's leading producer of wheat, rice, vegetables, pork, fish and myriad other crops. It is an agricultural powerhouse. Northeast China and the North China Plain look like the upper midwest, with cornfields stretching as far as the eye can see. (Yeah, it's still China; there are a lot of rural villages of 3,000 people scattered around as well. The Chinese grain belt isn't depopulated like the northern plains. Yet.) Calories are not an issue.

The challenge for China is that, as China has developed, the Chinese people want to eat better. This means a lot of things, but greater access to high quality animal proteins is at the top of the list. China's diet is evolving towards more and more varied meat and dairy products. China can't produce the quantity of feed grains it needs to move a billion-plus people to a first world diet. They will either have to import feed grains or finished product.

That bodes well for U.S. and South American agricultural exporters in the long run. The important caution, however, is to guard against the idea that China has to import or starve. Not so. The question is whether, and for how long, the Chinese government is willing to disappoint the desire of Chinese consumers for ever more high quality meat and dairy products. But they won't starve.

[mad_as_he$$]

But they are hungry again in an hour!

All kidding aside - good post.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

CIWS was pulled from Navy ships? Who told you that?

I don't know how you perform maintenance on something that isn't there:

190521-N-PX867-1200 PACIFIC OCEAN (May 21, 2019) - Sailors assigned to the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer (LHD 4) perform a combat load on the forward Phalanx close-in weapons system (CIWS). The Boxer Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) and 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) are deployed to the U.S. 7th area of operations to support regional stability, reassure partners and allies, and maintain a presence to respond to any crisis ranging from humanitarian assistance to contingency operations. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Justin Whitley/Released)

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Yeah, they sure tell a good story. Next week we’ll see their next super-weapon, an ICBM-sized missile that deploys squids that are so slick they can’t be detected by radar. Then when they coast in close, a rocket charge deploys out of each squid’s mouth and goes in for the kill.

[Spktyr]

That would be the Navy that announced they were removing them in favor of SeaRAM launchers up until a couple years ago. They have hastily been putting the actual CIWS back on the vessels they were removed from. Several recent Burkes were built without CIWS as well.

[elbook]

simply will expand exploration/discovery/production elsewhere in the World

sometimes just a slight increase in commodity price is enough to tip it past being profitable and to bring significant increases in production (particularly with modern mining recovery methods)

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

Why can’t I find anything on this? The only thing I did find was that the new Arleigh Burke class were getting one CIWS instead of two, and I would agree that’s a mistake. But actually pulling hardware off and putting it in warehouses? That’s not what I’m seeing, at all. I searched Navy.mil’s pictures section using the search term “CIWS”. There’s 20 pages of pictures going back to 2003 with no real gaps in time. There shouldn’t be pictures of test firings and guys working on them if they were sitting in boxes in a warehouse. It seems like there would’ve been an article or two in USNI Proceedings either lauding the decision or decrying it, I’ve got nothing.

Be wary of blogs. Blogs are full of military “experts” that haven’t spent 5 minutes in the military, have only touched hardware at an airshow, and spend most of their time downloading pretty pictures and reading exciting blog stories. Most of the time, military blogs are foreign-owned and purposely full of errors and bad assumptions so that people who really know something will come along, tell them all the stuff that they’re doing wrong, and viola! they just successfully solicited a whole bunch of good information. Unclassified info can be sensitive and violate OPSEC, too.

[Zhang Fei]

Afghanistan has more rare earth elements than China. CIA fact sheet 2010. Then again, fwiw. 5.56mm]

I expect that's just a bunch of heavy breathing by know-nothing journalists armed with ten minutes of conversation with inebriated geologists in-country for a few weeks of quick peeks in between bouts of heavy drinking.

Verified reserves are as follows:

Note that Afghanistan doesn't appear anywhere on this list. A Chinese company signed a copper contract with the Afghans in 2014. No one has heard hide nor hair of anything this company has done since. Bottom line is people chasing mineral riches in Afghanistan are chasing phantoms.

[Spktyr]

To use just one example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz

May 1998 to June 2001 – Refueling and Complex Overhaul – starboard bow catapult bridle removed; top two levels of the island replaced; new antenna mast; new radar tower; RAM replaced CIWS at forward port sponson; RAM added to aft starboard sponson; 2 CIWS at island/stern removed.

The CIWS was hastily returned in 2012 once the Navy realized that was a bad idea.

That was just one ship; I can find plenty more.

[Redwood71]

China’s food imports make up 6.7 percent of its total merchandise imports, placing it ahead of the United States (5.7 percent), India (5.6 percent), and Brazil (5.1 percent). China is the world’s largest importer of soybeans and other food crops, and is expected to become the top importer of farm products within the next decade. In 2018, meat, oil, dairy, and seafood were among the most popular food imports in China. Easily topping the list of food importers is China, which is the world’s biggest producer, importer and consumer of food. The US is third behind India.

China has other things on their list to work for. China makes and sells more manufacturing goods than any other country on the planet. The range of Chinese goods includes iron, steel, aluminum, textiles, cement, chemicals, toys, electronics, rail cars, ships, aircraft and many other products. But you don’t see food there as they can’t consistently produce it fast enough to stay with their growing population.

According to Business Insider, “China is now losing cropland.” It is being replaced with manufacturing factories. But the Chinese government has started leasing farms in North and South America, Australia, and Africa. In some cases, it has bought the land outright. But in solving its own problem, China may inadvertently put much greater strains on the global food supply. Some evidence suggests this is already the case with the grains the country imports to feed cattle, according to USDA research. Producing one pound of beef requires seven pounds of grain.

According to a report by the the United States Department of Agriculture in 2016, China started the outsource purchase of farmland in the early 2000’s consistent with their joining the WTO, in North and South America, and Africa in an effort to assist their food stocks. In the US, our agriculture department considers about an acre of land per person. In China currently it’s .2 acres per.
But as China expands its international food operations, the risks of a widening food crisis only continue to build as they transition to a more western diet they can’t sustain and their population continues to go sky high.

China, even though it is one of the largest land areas in the word, is also the largest populated with 1.4B people. And even though India is expected to surpass China by 2030, Pew Research expects a 2.3% gain by 2025. i.e. around 70M. And this is being caused by China’s inability to support itself consistently. And the estimated growth, even though it is an improvement at 70M, is already bigger than the population of such countries as the UK, France, Italy, and Spain right now. They are fighting a power curve that they identified almost 20 years ago and are still behind it.

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/

rwood

[Pete from Shawnee Mission]

https://investorintel.com/sectors/technology-metals/technology-metals-intel/niocorp-and-ibc-have-developed-an-aluminum-scandium-master-alloy/?_ga=2.103108416.1328642424.1559139218-1894422627.1559139218

“In a joint project with IBC Advanced Alloys, NioCorp announced in October the successful production of an aluminum-scandium master alloy. NioCorp and IBC intend to utilize the master alloy from this program to further the companies’ ongoing efforts to develop specialty scandium containing alloys and/or prototype products for potential commercial use. This agreement is to investigate and develop applications for scandium-containing materials for a range of downstream markets.In a joint project with IBC Advanced Alloys, NioCorp announced in October the successful production of an aluminum-scandium master alloy. NioCorp and IBC intend to utilize the master alloy from this program to further the companies’ ongoing efforts to develop specialty scandium containing alloys and/or prototype products for potential commercial use. This agreement is to investigate and develop applications for scandium-containing materials for a range of downstream markets.”

[piasa]

Bumping your very prescient post. Crisis here, Democrats are doing just as you predicted.

[Grimmy]

This can be corrected by gutting the power of the EPA and BLM.

We have rare earths. We can be self sufficient. We’re not allowed to be by these agencies that write their own rules for their own purposes.