alt Hacker News> Now that China has become more adversarial and also more established (you mean people want to actually get PAID to slave away in a mine, or even worse, refuse to even work in a dangerous and dirty pit mine?!) the US is facing some hard decisions.
There is an implication here that the United States is immune or afraid of doing “hard” or “dirty” work and so we outsourced refining and mining to China.
This doesn’t seem to be correct.
China has a national strategy to dominate refining of rare earth minerals and critical components and our entire society wants cheap products and China was the cheapest place for this stuff and environmental rules are more lax, and with an authoritarian regime supporting and fast tracking the business for strategic reasons, well there you have it.
Part of the strategy involves decoupling China from a weak link in the energy supply chain infrastructure: oil and refining rare earths, manufacturing products that use them, and more is how they are pursuing some level of energy independence from the USA which controls oil flows globally, for the most part.
With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far, far worse in this respect than the United States is or was.
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> With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far, far worse in this respect than the United States is or was.
Well yeah. Because we care about the environment and people like to enjoy their retirement instead of sitting in a wheelchair with COPD due to inhaling a lifetime of toxic dust.
China is getting better at it too, but only a few years ago I remember a story of all the toxic lakes where all the byproducts of neodymium mining were dumped.
A good way to put it as "China was very willing to subsidize the cost of mining these elements as environmental damage".
West fine with migrant labours doing hard and dirty work hidden from prying eyes (agriculture fields, meat packing plants). Mining just as strategic, but hard to hide big holes in the earth from constituents. I'm sure push comes to shove, US can import a bunch of central Americans to do hard and dirty work in mining.
Don't make China the boogey man here, when it was America's rich that exported all those things (jobs, manufacturing, solid supply chains) to China.
People in the US will do dirty jobs if thats what there are, but like people everywhere (in aggregate), would rather not.
We outsourced refining and mining to China because 1) it was cheap 2) it meant poisoning the ground and air and ripping up vast tracts of land somewhere else.
China's rare earth metals stratagem I believe grew out of this--it didn't happen immediately, but rather some bright bulb saw the growing reliance on access to the minerals and encouraged internal growth and acquisition competing resources. Absolutely, very clever.