> China has 50 years of ore refinement development behind them.
No it doesn't (at best its about 35 years) and it often (mostly) uses equipment made in the west. In fact, if you want to extract something from the earth, its very likely you need a US firm to help you do it (depends on how hard the material is to extract).
> and ecological collapse
You can do mining responsibly, it just costs more. US firms about 20 years ago tried to get the US government to subsidize their industries to compensate for the extra costs. The politicians said no and voiced environmental concerns. So those materials started coming from China and the 3rd world where they were extracted using even dirtier methods than the US was using at the time. It turns out that pollution doesn't obey international borders though.
Finally, most of the material China exports is raw and its refined somewhere else. The only things China refines for themselves are either a) is easy and they need them domestically or b) the refining process is very dirty. Additionally, mining almost always takes place far from population centers. The basic reason for this is that all the material near population centers was extracted far in the past. Your entire take has little to no resemblance with reality.
>almost always takes place far from population centers
No in PRC case, they literally build population centers to service mining, part of third front strategy in 60s to move mining into rugged interior to protect against US/USSR. If you want to mine/process at PRC scale, you need to plop a few million people in large urban complexes i.e. boutou has 3 million people, they're not 5000 people mining towns.
It's amazing how many people think China bootstrapped its industry from first principals when all it did was lure western companies to move their production over and "learned" by copying.
Yeah, and they fell for it. Handed over all their intellectual "property" to the chinese on a silver platter. Moved all their production to China, thereby deindustrializing their own countries and impoverishing their fellow citizens to the point of nearly wiping out the middle class.
I wonder if it's even possible for the west to save itself at this point.
He bought IP from people who didn't see value in it. He obtained state subsidies and convinced politicians to see his sector as a national priority. When he couldn't buy the know how, he had it reverse engineered from samples.
West just needs to go back to what used to work, and what still works. If China could industrialize itself from practically nothing, why couldn't western countries do something similar? Some of them already did after WWII.
It's just a matter of will. And accepting that there will have to be compromises and certain level of sacrifice.
"Fell for it" looks a lot like "basically compelled by the economic impacts of public policy and political winds" so far as I can tell.
Some man in a C-suite in 2002 who was wrestling with a decision to refresh domestic factories with capital investments that would pay off over the next 15yr and be competitive for 30 or build new in China could only make that decision one way without being ousted by his own board. Even if the economics barely penciled out positively after compliance costs the political winds made it too risky.
I mean, yeah, someone fell for it. The public, the politicians, etc. etc. But it's not like anyone who didn't have to grapple with the numbers didn't know what they were doing was suspect at best, though many of course deluded themselves into believing in it.
How many decades and dollars did we spend shipping trash plastic overseas because they provided us with receipts saying they were recycling it when they were landfilling, burning or dumping it? Everyone who knew the chemistry and energy prices knew it didn't really work but still, it happened.
The fact is at some point the USA shifted from nation to an amalgamate of corporations. The US government serves the interests of corporations that have gone multinational, corporations that are barely american at this point, corporations that now kowtow before China lest they lose access to the chinese market and its growing middle class. Meanwhile China consistently demonstrates the ability to plan and execute long term strategies that advance the interests of the chinese civilization. I don't like it but I have to respect it. They're making democracies and their leaders look like complete idiots who care about nothing but muh reelection.
Because they do. It's a well known fact that they outright copy western designs and sell them at significantly cheaper prices. The ~$100 Diesel fuel heaters on Vevor and elsewhere are 1:1 copies of German Westabo heaters that retail for upward of $3500 USD. The story of the Cherry QQ which was a 1:1 copy of the Chevy Spark. The list goes on. But please, keep pretending they didn't just copy everyone else while many of their engineers went to western universities and bought home that knowledge.
There's a reason western M/HREE (i.e. the strategic good stuff) strategy hedges on similar iconic clays finds like PRC, because that's the only working industrial chain that extracts M/HREEs at scale. It's why AU/Lynas focus on ionic clays and not US hardrock... which btw doesn't even pretend it will do anything meaningful for mineral security other than light REE.
US+co is trying to replicate PRC M/HREE industry, without the techstack that took PRC decades to build out, because US+co never developed these geologies in the first place. The relevant upstream extraction/mmidstream refining tech for kind of deposits was never pursued in the west.
Now west can move fast due to second mover advantage, but it's going to be slow going like PRC EUV. Until then it's going to require all sorts of parallel efforts like recycling, or materials engineering to reduce M/HREEs to mitigate gap.
Would you fucking stop crying already. What did you expect them to do? Commit to being a slave and leave all the value to western corps? And who asked western companies to outsource everything? It seems that for an extra buck they would sell everything. So you basically reap what you sow
Every time there is a discussion about how China is wiping the floor with the west, someone wants to chime in that they stole IP. It is an unhealthy fixation and betrays the fact that they are genuinely more efficient in many cases, even when labor costs and subsidies are removed.
Not to mention, complaining about China stealing IP is a pacifier. Even where true, it does not change the competitive dynamics at this point because any damage has already been done.
If we, as the west, want to be great, we will have to move beyond the victim stage.
