Resource war ahead! China "tightening its grip" on rare earths!

Chart found here.  It all looks so suspiciously similar huh?  Like production magically rises to meet global demand.  Pretty strange, that.  Like some invisible hand guides the process . . .

China, which controls 90 percent of production of rare earths globally right now, is believed to be stockpiling a strategic reserve (always suspicious when somebody else does it, but entirely sensible when the US does).  The US, for example, still has defense-tended stockpiles of strategic commodities from WWII!  China, as in all things, simply catches up, like creating a strategic petroleum reserve like ours.

WSJ gets it right:

Many rare-earth minerals aren't actually rare, and China doesn't have a monopoly on deposits of any particular rare-earth elements.

China has half the world reserve total, then the FSU has just under one-fifth, then the US with about 1/10th, and the rest of the world owns the remainder one-fifth.

Naturally, there are calls for the US to start similarly stockpiling rare-earths, rather than rely on potential enemy China.

Not a big trick.  Somebody's just got to spend the money to make the US mines profitable.

But it's interesting:  the more China connects to the world, the more nervous we get--and plan to protect ourselves with these various dreams of autarky.  Quite the reversal from the Cold War, huh?