A continuing series of well thought out 5 year plans gave China their rare earth elements empire while the West was sleeping.
https://archive.ph/dTVFT
China’s centrality in rare earths didn’t happen by accident. It is the result of decades of planning and domestic and overseas investment, often directed from the highest levels of the party and the Chinese government.
A Five-Year Plan drafted by Mr. Deng and Mr. Fang, covering 1981 to 1985, ordered that China “increase the production of rare-earth metals.”
Today, China is working to cement its lead in rare earths by churning out more trained technicians and researchers than any other country. Programs in rare earths are offered by 39 universities.
The United States and Europe have no such programs — not even at Iowa State University, an institution that once trained generations of American engineers in rare earths. Iowa State has not offered a course in rare earths for the last several years and has one graduate student doing independent study in the field. It plans to offer a course next year.
China has hundreds of scientists exploring rare-earth technologies. Technicians at a refinery in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai, spent seven years doing experiments to refine dysprosium, a rare earth, to extraordinary purity. The refinery is now the world’s sole source of that rare earth, which is used in capacitors — tiny devices to control electricity — found in Nvidia’s Blackwell artificial intelligence chips.
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