For more than a decade, the U.S. has been sounding the alarm about China’s stranglehold on rare earths. Is it finally going to do something about it?
A rare earth ingot, photographed in China in 2013. Credit: Sim Chi Yin via Magnum
On an early September morning 10 years ago, the Chinese fishing trawler Minjinyun 5179 collided with a Japanese Coast Guard patrol boat in the East China Sea. The trawler had been fishing near disputed territory controlled by Japan known as the Senkaku islands, or Diaoyu in Chinese. Beijing had been increasingly hawkish towards numerous contested territories, but a long-standing animosity between the two countries made the Senkakus a particularly fiery flashpoint.
The Japanese Coast Gua
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If Xi Jinping orders the People’s Liberation Army to take Taiwan by force, can the island turn itself into a porcupine and muster wholesale “societal resistance” from its 23 million people? Brent Crane reports from Taipei.
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