The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) recently published an article titled “Ending China’s 60-Year Grip on Critical Minerals.”Its central argument can be summarized as follows: For decades, democratic countries allowed free markets to outsource manufacturing and supply chains, while China systematically established dominance in the mining, processing, and downstream manufacturing of critical minerals through state planning, cheap capital, and tolerance of environmental costs. China now accounts for approximately 60% of global rare earth mining, 90% of processing and separation, and 94% of permanent magnet manufacturing, and has weaponized export controls. The United States and Europe must therefore emulate the Allied model of World War II by establishing price floors, building strategic reserves, coordinating with allies, and substantially increasing government investment in research and development to rebuild independent supply chains. Otherwise, they will remain vulnerable to Beijing.
This narrative has gained considerable traction in Western security circles. Yet a closer examination reveals significant problems with its historical framing, threat construction, and policy prescriptions.
I. The Rhetorical Exaggeration of “60 Years of Control”
The article repeatedly emphasizes “six decades” and “60 years of state support,” portraying China’s position in critical minerals as the result of a long-term strategy of “control” dating back to the 1960s. The historical record, however, is considerably more nuanced.
China did begin paying attention to rare earth resources associated with deposits such as Bayan Obo in the mid-1960s. Deng Xiaoping also famously stressed the importance of developing rare earths alongside the steel industry. Breakthroughs in separation technology followed in the 1970s, and Chinese production expanded rapidly during the 1980s. By around 1986, China had become the world's largest rare earth producer. However, its dominant position in global processing, separation, and permanent magnet manufacturing did not emerge overnight. It took shape primarily from the 1990s through the early 2000s, as China progressively translated its resource endowment and industrial policies into downstream advantages through cost competitiveness, export policies, technology acquisition, and industrial consolidation.
Deng's famous 1992 remark, “The Middle East has oil; China has rare earths,” was an acknowledgment of an advantage that had already begun to emerge, not the starting point of that advantage.
Equating the beginning of state attention to rare earths with “60 years of control” is a classic case of rhetorical compression. It reduces a lengthy process of industrial development into a narrative of deliberate monopolization pursued from the outset, thereby reinforcing the subsequent call for an urgent counteroffensive.
A more accurate description would be that China spent more than three decades transforming its resource endowment and industrial policies into advantages in processing and downstream manufacturing. Exaggerating the historical time frame weakens the credibility of the analysis.
II. Securitizing China’s Advantages While Ignoring the Double Standard
The article's most fundamental problem lies in its one-sided construction of the threat. It defines China's resource and industrial advantages as a direct threat to Western security and calls for government intervention to “end” China's dominance. Yet it completely overlooks a series of measures adopted by the United States and its Western allies to restrict China's access to technology, including export controls, entity-list designations, and other forms of technological containment.
China's strength in rare earth processing and permanent magnet manufacturing does create genuine supply-chain concentration risks. That is an objective fact. But the United States and its allies have long maintained overwhelming advantages in areas such as advanced semiconductors, sophisticated lithography equipment, critical software, and aircraft engines. They have repeatedly used entity lists, technology embargoes, investment screening, and other instruments to restrict China's access to these capabilities. China, in turn, views such measures as part of a broader campaign of pressure and containment.
Both sides are securitizing and instrumentalizing the strategic advantages they possess. This is a recurring feature of great-power competition, not a phenomenon unique to China.
The article emphasizes China's tolerance of environmental costs and state-backed capital while failing to acknowledge that Western countries also made choices that contributed to the current situation. As environmental and labor standards tightened, some Western industries withdrew from pollution-intensive processing. Western economies also came to rely heavily on inexpensive imports, while subsequently restricting the international flow of technology through export controls.
This selective account attributes the outcome of market competition almost entirely to China's deliberate pursuit of dominance, while downplaying Western policy choices and recasting long-standing dependence on low-cost imports as a failure of strategic planning.
The resulting contradiction is difficult to ignore: the article criticizes China for using industrial policy to build competitive advantages, yet calls for the West to intervene on a massive scale through government funding, price floors, and strategic stockpiling. The underlying logic is not internally consistent.
III. The Wishful Thinking Behind the Policy Prescriptions
The article calls on the United States and Europe to establish coordinated price floors, build strategic reserves, pursue joint procurement, and accelerate innovation to leapfrog Chinese technology. These proposals may have some merit in reducing supply-chain vulnerabilities, but they overlook two important realities.
First, price floors and strategic reserves are themselves highly politicized instruments. Their implementation would inevitably raise questions about subsidy competition, trade friction, and the distribution of costs and benefits among allies. The article itself acknowledges that policy volatility in the United States has already undermined allies' confidence in Washington's commitments.
Without genuine mutual trust, efforts to impose a common price floor or establish a preferential trading bloc could easily degenerate into competitive bidding, disputes over burden-sharing, and mutual recrimination rather than effective cooperation.
Second, rebuilding critical mineral supply chains requires long-term capital, accumulated technical expertise, and a willingness to bear environmental costs. China's advantages in separation and permanent magnet manufacturing were not achieved simply by being “cheap.” They also reflect decades of process innovation, industrial learning, workforce development, and accumulated technical expertise.
The idea that government funding and allied coordination alone can offset these advantages underestimates the technological and economies-of-scale barriers involved.
More importantly, it is difficult to see how a sustainable arrangement could emerge if Western countries invoke national security to restrict China's access to technology while simultaneously expecting China to continue supplying raw materials at low prices. This is a classic case of “one rule for the ruler and another for everyone else.”
Conclusion
CEPA's article correctly identifies the risks associated with the concentration of critical mineral supply chains and makes a legitimate case for the United States and Europe to pay greater attention to industrial policy and allied coordination. Its argument is not without merit.
However, by relying on an exaggerated historical narrative, a one-sided construction of threats, and selective blindness to Western policy choices, the article reduces a complex pattern of great-power competition to a mobilizing slogan: China's control must be ended.
The reality is more complicated. Both sides use the strategic positions they occupy in global supply chains as instruments of geopolitical bargaining. Rare earths and semiconductors, permanent magnets and lithography equipment, are simply different instruments within the same broader logic of strategic competition.
A more responsible analysis would acknowledge the realities of mutual interdependence and reciprocal constraints, and critically examine the costs and consequences of each side's policy choices. It would not automatically securitize the other side's competitive advantages and declare them threats that must be “ended.”
Otherwise, the article's calls for “trust, cooperation, and innovation” risk remaining confined to a process of self-reinforcement within the Western camp, doing little to reduce systemic risks to global supply chains.