Posted on 09/22/2010 9:57:41 PM PDT by lbryce
Sharply raising the stakes in a dispute over Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing trawler captain, the Chinese government has placed a trade embargo on all exports to Japan of a crucial category of minerals used in products like hybrid cars, wind turbines and guided missiles.
Chinese customs officials are halting all shipments to Japan of so-called rare earth elements, industry officials said on Thursday morning.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao personally called for Japan’s release of the captain, who was detained after his vessel collided with two Japanese coast guard vessels about 40 minutes apart as he tried to fish in waters controlled by Japan but long claimed by China. Mr. Wen threatened unspecified further actions if Japan did not comply.
A Chinese commerce ministry official declined on Thursday to discuss the country’s trade policy on rare earths, saying only that Mr. Wen’s comments remained the Chinese government’s position.
China mines 93 percent of the world’s rare earth minerals, and more than 99 percent of the world’s supply of some of the most prized rare earths, which sell for several hundred dollars a pound.
Dudley Kingsnorth, the executive director of the Industrial Minerals Company of Australia, a rare earth consulting company, said that several executives in the rare earths industry had already expressed worries to him about the export ban. The executives have been told that the initial ban lasts through the end of the month, and that the Chinese government will reassess then whether to extend the ban if the fishing captain still has not been released, Mr. Kingsnorth said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
No Neodymium for Nippon!
No Neodymium for Nippon!
I guess Japan will have to stop making hybrid cars and wind turbines.
Dang.
No Terbium for Turbines?
Well...that ought to wilt their rice noodles.
I'm sure you meant "Get ready, 'cause here I come.."
If they want to play that game, Japan can block imports of ALL Chinese foodstuffs and plastic knickknacks, most of which are garbage or cheap trash, respectively. Nobody in Japan is going to starve to death for lack of cheap frozen food and no Japanese house is going to collapse without their Chinese made dustpan.
Further, China still receives a huge amount of development aid (US $532.5 million as recently as 2007) and wouldn’t the Chinese squawk if Tokyo were to turn off THAT pipeline.
Actually, that’s something that should have been done a long time ago. If China is rich enough to launch manned spacecraft and build a continuously expanding and aggressive navy, they do not need Japan’s money to fund their infrastructure projects.
Tokyo needs to buckle down on this one. Any softening of their position will be seen as weakness in Beijing and will just prompt further incursions.
There will be no such thing as an “Asian War”.
If war breaks out between any of the principal players in Asia: China, India, Korea, Japan and Australia, it will be World War III, and the US will inevitably get sucked into it.
The Japanese lose money on each hybrid, and I doubt the wind turbine industry is a typical government sponsored mis allocation of investment.
So, the Chinks are doing the Japs a favor!
( Besides, it just means the bribe price went up a bit and China becomes a bit more corrupt, or free of central government dictates. )
The world’s largest deposit of rare earths is in the US... closed by Clinton... now nature study area or some such.
I disagree with the point of this statement. Your statements sounds like the embargo on business with the Japanese in the Thirties was in a vacuum, just because the USA was racist and picking on the poor undeserving Japanese. It wasn't.
It was because Japan invaded an ostensible ally of ours and was brutally occupying Manchuria, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians (Nanking) spreading into China and finally, when it entered French Indochina, the US did what it SHOULD have done, slapped an embargo on various strategic materials.
What is going on here is a territorial issue where the aggressor (CHINA) does not have a legal claim to the areas it was forcibly attempting to fish in, even though it feels like it has a historical claim. It was doing this to provoke an issue, to give it an excuse to tighten the screws because it CAN. Then the aggressor (CHINA) slaps a punitive embargo on the country defending itself (JAPAN) and its legally verified interests. (The rest of the world RECOGNIZES Japan's claim to the waters, not China's)
Note that I don't disagree with your end result, it is the invoking of America as the CAUSE of Pearl Harbor, when in actuality, it was the JAPANESE who CAUSED Pearl Harbor, both in lead-up and in deed.
But again, you are right. Anyone who thought the Communists would behave any differently (because they wore the mask of capitalism in order to make money) was deluding themselves. They are Communists, and they are all about tyranny and naked power.
This is what makes the pathetic, slobbering Communist China admirers like Thomas Friedman particularly offensive to me.
China owns the rights to 96% of the entire planet’s rare mineral mines. Sure, there are others places to mine them, but damn few.
I was wondering how long it was going to take them to pull the rare earth carrot; turns out it was much, much sooner than I expected.
Ditto, they played this card in a rather low importance scenario. The Chinese must not play poker.
I think they wanted the world to see they had the card...
Like the old west gunfighter who carries the nickle plated six shooter with pearl grips. Those embelishments don’t make the gun draw faster or shoot straighter... they just say “See My Gun”
Another possibility: the Chinese public is really, really ticked off over this issue, and the powers that be decided they could not afford to underplay the conflict.
A half a billion dollars puts that mine back into play. Seems like a very cheap investment in national security to me. Don't count on Hussein to do it. He will be too busy dodging impeachment next year.
You are off by a geographic mile.
NAFTA involves only trade with Mexico and Canada.
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