Dependência ocidental da China no tocante a minerais críticos:
China's Other Minerals Monopoly: autonomous mining!
LILY OTTINGER
China Talk, JUL 30
Today’s guest post was authored by Nima Khorrami, a Stockholm-based Research Associate at the Arctic Institute, Centre for Circumpolar Security Studies.
After decades of neglect, Washington has adopted a coherent and “forceful” response to China’s dominance over critical minerals. China controls an estimated 91 percent of global rare earth refining, dominates the processing of a wide range of minerals, and has demonstrated repeatedly that it is willing to weaponise that position. The United States has responded through a range of initiatives and policy packages including Executive Order 14241, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and Pax Silica. Add bilateral deals with Australia, Japan, the DRC, and Saudi Arabia, and the result is undeniably a more aggressive and cohesive mineral strategy than the United States has attempted in decades.
The problem is not with any of these agreements and frameworks. Instead, it is with what is systematically absent from them. The entire architecture of American mineral strategy, and indeed the EU’s parallel effort under its Critical Raw Materials Act and RESourceEU, is built around two variables: where minerals are located and who processes them. What it consistently underweights is a third variable that will most likely prove equally consequential over the medium term: who controls the technology that operates the mines themselves. This constitutes the central strategic blind spot in the West’s mineral autonomy agenda because China is not just dominant in mineral processing. Beijing is also rapidly establishing dominance in the operational technology of extraction; the autonomous systems, industrial AI, connectivity infrastructure, and integrated machine intelligence that will define how the world’s future mines will run. Today, we’ll explore China’s dominance in autonomous mining technology and what to do about it.
If that dominance goes unchecked, the US and its allies could succeed in securing access to mineral deposits across friendly jurisdictions and still find those mines dependent on Chinese operational technology to function.
