alt Hacker NewsWest had nothing to teach/copy in many cases - there's a reason PRC produced magnitude more mining engineers for decades. Leaching MREE/HREE from ionic clays is a geologic tech stack that PRC fully built out indigenously from 60s. Only reason M/HREE can be refined at _scale_ and _economically_ today was PRC innovating on geology west never bothered in (west ree stack concentrated on hard rock extraction), and now west has to try to replicate via first principles.
The "the Chinese can only copy us" thing is quite common in some circles, just as the "all the Japanese can do is copy us" was 50-odd years ago. China overtook the west in a lot of areas 10-20 years ago, to see an example of this travel to any city in China. It's like travelling into the future, we're a decade or more behind them at this stage.