China Found Something Better Than Oil
Sep 11, 2026 · 27:26
This episode explains how China built a 94% monopoly on magnet rare earths—99% on samarium—deliberately rather than by geology, tracing the 1995 sale of General Motors' Magnequench division to firms tied to Deng Xiaoping's son-in-laws. It covers how the 1983 neodymium magnet from GM and Hitachi Metals shrank motors in AirPods, EVs, and Tomahawk missiles, and how the Mountain Pass mine shut down after thorium spills made US refining unviable. It lays out China's four-step playbook: cheap state loans, export caps that quadrupled world prices, extracting know-how from foreign firms, then flooding markets to kill new mines. It ends with the April 4, 2025 samarium export ban and the Pentagon's countermove—take-or-pay deals guaranteeing $110 per kilogram for 10 years while Mountain Pass reopens with a Texas processing facility.
