Ye old mercantalism. Unfortunately we also have Trump also running the same playbook. And yes everyone notices.
It is called shortterm advantage for long term pain that litearally is crushing. China is now catching it in the critical metals business and we will watch Canada open mines, not just in Canada but also worldwide. all selling product to all of Chinas customers on long term contracts
If you do not pay attention to the health of your customer ,they can disappear. And Canada has formed a coalition of the willing which can be used to secure fair pricing for market access and protection from Chinese pressure.
How China used dirty price wars to knock out competitors in Rare Earths production
By Jo Nova
https://joannenova.com.au/2026/05/how-china-used-dirty-price-wars-to-knock-out-competitors-in-rare-earths-production/
Means, motive, and opportunity. It looks for all the world like China used dirty tactics to corner the rare earth processing plants of the world.
Michael Kern argues that for the last twenty years, every time a Western rare earth mining operation looked like it was about to build its own processing plant, Chinese producers would flood the market and crash the price of the metal. The investment case would evaporate and the company would go out of business.
This kind of predatory capitalism is all very well until the nice guys realize what’s going on and ban your products from their defense contracts, back their own start ups, and those companies develop their own processing techniques, which is what is starting to occur in the US now.
China was treating rare earths as a strategic weapon, while the West assumed the free market was free, and was hooked on the cheaper stuff.
All’s fair in love and war, but dirty tricks have their own price.
By Michael Kern, Oilprice
The West handed its rare earth processing capability to China roughly 40 years ago. The last major U.S. rare earth mine, Mountain Pass in California, closed in 2002, unable to compete with Chinese production costs. By 2010, China controlled approximately 90-95% of global rare earth production and an even larger share of the processing and refining that turns raw material into usable metals and magnets.
China was able to control the price because it not only controlled 90% of global rare earth production, but it also controls the Asian Metal Index (AMI).
Even if the western company survived the price crash, they were often dependent on Chinese technology that only Chinese operators could maintain, and the CCP sometimes withdrew support leaving the western company with something they couldn’t use.
The Crisis That Should Have Changed Everything
The most dramatic chapter of this story came in 2010, when a territorial dispute between China and Japan over the Senkaku Islands triggered what many consider the first open weaponization of rare earth supply.
In September 2010, China unofficially halted rare earth shipments to Japan. Within months, rare earth prices spiked dramatically, with the prices of some oxides increasing more than tenfold. The price of dysprosium oxide alone surged from roughly $90 per kilogram in early 2009 to over $2,300 per kilogram by mid-2011.
What followed was a gold rush.
Then China did what it usually does. After the initial panic subsided and prices peaked, China eased its restrictions and flooded the market with supply. Prices collapsed just as quickly as they had risen. Dysprosium oxide, which had peaked above $2,300, fell back below $200 per kilogram by 2016. One by one, the Western projects that had launched during the boom ran out of money, ran out of investors, or simply couldn’t compete. Molycorp, the company behind the Mountain Pass revival, filed for bankruptcy in 2015.
Read it all. It’s a long article describing how things are changing. On January 1 next year, the US defense procurement rules will ban all Chinese origin rare earth materials. That means price-wars can’t shake out the US suppliers. The US government is also going to financially back key suppliers. One company called REalloy has developed its own processing pathway. It is expected to produce 525 tonnes per year of neodymium-praseodymium metal by early next year.
Dirty tricks may help in the short term, but in the long run, it takes a long time to win back the trust.
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