This bizarro take. PRC mining equipment has been decoupled from US for years, they don't require hardware from western producers anymore, from terrestrial to deep sea. The last dependency was mostly unconventional shale since US good at shale but that's mostly consultative, and PRC quickly found out US horizontal drilling doesn't translate well for their deeper reserves, so they had to localize tools there as well. The talent gap is also stupendously in favor of PRC, they produce like 15x more mining graduates per year, their university of mining tech enrolls more than all US mining programs combined. They lead in midstream refining, not just REE bottleneck, all that AU/BR ore gets shipped to PRC for refining for a reason.

>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.