{"id":478520,"date":"2026-06-15T14:48:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T14:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/478520\/"},"modified":"2026-06-15T14:48:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T14:48:07","slug":"americas-new-critical-minerals-playbook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/478520\/","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s New Critical Minerals Playbook"},"content":{"rendered":"

Beijing did not come to dominate the critical minerals market overnight. \u201cThe Middle East has oil. China has rare earth<\/a> metals,\u201d Deng Xiaoping, the leader of China\u2019s economic reforms, is believed to have said<\/a> in 1992. Even that statement may understate the degree of market concentration seen today. During the Arab oil embargo, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries accounted for slightly over 50%<\/a> of global crude oil production, a figure that has since fallen to below 35%<\/a>. China, by contrast, now leads production for 30 of the 44<\/a> critical minerals for which there are reliable estimates, commands an average market share of over 70%<\/a> for strategic minerals, and accounts for 93%<\/a> of magnet manufacturing. <\/p>\n

The critical minerals standoff between Washington and Beijing last year was novel, but not unprecedented. In 2010<\/a>, Beijing embargoed rare earths exports to Tokyo as a result of a dispute with Japan. In 2020, China reportedly cut off exports of graphite to Sweden. Indeed, last year\u2019s measures added to a litany of resource nationalism: globally, restrictions on critical minerals have risen five fold<\/a> since 2009. Despite the high levels of concentration in this market there is, however, no monopoly on the sources of rare earths: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Greenland, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, the US, and Russia all possess substantial mineral deposits, as do many other countries and territories. The landscape changes when we consider the capacity<\/a> for rare earth purification, synthesis or fabrication, and manufacturing assembly. This is where China has unmatched capacity and a strategy to hold it. As the Department of Defense has noted, Chinese firms, willing to operate at losses, have \u201cstrategically flood[ed] the global market<\/a>\u201d with rare earth elements to decrease competition. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Beijing did not come to dominate the critical minerals market overnight. \u201cThe Middle East has oil. China has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":478521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69,377],"class_list":["post-478520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}