Regional focus
Pedal to F 12
or much of the past century, mining in China has had a robustly proletarian feel. Look up posters from the height of the Maoist era and you’ll see what I mean. One shows bare-armed workers, muscles rippling, marching confidently towards the future of socialism. Another presents a middle-aged miner, orange helmet on his head, his arm around his schoolboy son. Nor was mining’s association with global revolution merely a propaganda sop. Mao’s own path to the Forbidden City, after all, arguably began when he organised a 1922 strike among discontented coal miners in Jiangxi province. After their final victory over
the metal
As China strengthens its grip over rare earth elements, the West is coming to realise how dependent they risk becoming on the nation over the coming years. Andrea Valentino speaks to Professor Kristin Vekasi, a China supply chain expert at the University of Maine, and Professor Marina Yue Zhang, an expert on Chinese manufacturing at the University of Technology Sydney, on how the country has come to dominate the global rare earth market, what the West can do to wrestle back some control – and what it all means for the future of geopolitics across the planet.
the Nationalists, China’s revolutionary elite put huge weight on their ability to carve out iron and coal, training some 160,000 geologists in a matter of decades. Up to a point, Chinese mining’s Maoist heritage persists: it’s still the world’s biggest coal miner, while Communist Party apparatchiks continue to lean on powerful unions for support. In truth, however, much of Chinese mining has swapped heavy industry for high-tech – and nowhere is this clearer than in the realm of so-called ‘rare earth’ elements (REEs). This is clear from the numbers, with the People’s Republic accounting for 63% of the world’s rare earth mining.
World Mining Frontiers /
www.nsenergybusiness.com
LuYago/
Shutterstock.com
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