The Chinese have taken all the risks and subsidized all the output, while non-Chinese firms do most of the value-add work and reap most of the rewards. Second, because the ore isn’t rare and because the processing isn’t a secret and because the first Chinese threats were more than a decade ago, there are already backup mining and processing facilities in existence in South Africa, the United States, Australia, Malaysia, and France. They just don’t see a lot of activity, because the Chinese stuff is still available and still cheaper. If Chinese rare earths were to vanish from global supplies
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