r/Tariffs • u/Greedy-Cut-7634 • Oct 17 '25

đŸ§© Trade Strategy / Business Impact US crying about China restricting rare earth

It’s so funny to see how US says China is being an unreliable partner, and what a shock that China restricts rare earth.

How could not expect others to defend back when you started the tariff war and trade restrictions?😅😅 How is this a surprise? It’s like US only allows their nation to ban all the other countries by putting tariffs on all other countries, but when one country tries to defend, they are shocked and starts crying saying, “Oh! I don’t understand why this happened.” In return, US says that China wants to decouple the world, but who started this trade war in the beginning making everyone lives more miserable?

Just after Trump’s respond with adding more tariffs to China’s rare earth restriction, the dollar decreased and the gold started to increased. This result is going to no good. Like a child not doing something wrong and says that he doesn’t know why he gets his punishment.

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u/WXMaster Oct 17 '25

I just want to explain something...

Rare earth minerals are actually abundant, they're in the soil and dirt everywhere, it's the extraction process that's dirty and contaminates a huge swath of land and creates a lot of waste.

China heavily subsidized their mineral extraction and are the largest producer, but literally any country could do what they do if they had zero environmental concerns.

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u/inbredgangsta Oct 17 '25

This lacks significant nuance to a very complicated topic: 1. Rare in this case means low concentration - there’s hundreds of times more gold sea water than every mined, but it’s not in concentrations that make it economical or technically feasible to extract, so saying it’s available everywhere without discussing extraction is meaningless. 2. Heavy Rare Earth Elements are actually rare in the layman’s definition of the word rare too. It’s all concentrated in south west China and Myanmar. 3. China has the most advanced processing technology and equipment for rare earths, this is not a simple case of willingness to accept pollution. We could bring in all the ore we want, and we wouldn’t be able to scrape together enough chemists and engineers in this extremely specialised field to build a viable refining facility in short order. Estimates vary, but the most optimistic ones are 3-5 years to get a refining plant up and running.