Obama is making the Americans work for China!

[Sasaki Kojiro]

I expect china has 97% of the market because they decided to sell it for less than everyone else and worldwide production shut down. Very doubtful that 97% of the rare earth elements are in china.

[gaelic cowboy]

I expect china has 97% of the market because they decided to sell it for less than everyone else and worldwide production shut down. Very doubtful that 97% of the rare earth elements are in china.

Mostly they bought the rights to them materials cos no one cared too much about them what with them being rare and used for renewable industry. But you are correct that they did force others to close by selling cheaper then the bust happened and now the governments and companies need cash so there selling off there rights.

China has the rights to these minerals all over the place and they obviously have first dibs on them and at the minute that means the majority of the supply therefore comes from China

[Louis VI the Fat]

I expect china has 97% of the market because they decided to sell it for less than everyone else and worldwide production shut down. Very doubtful that 97% of the rare earth elements are in china.

The ores itself are found the world over. Processing them requires enormous investments, time, technology.

China's capturing of the market is a complicated story. It involves, amongst others:
Daylight technological robbery while America sleeps.
Half the students at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames National Laboratory are from China. Each time a visiting student returns to China, taking priceless know-how with him, he or she is replaced by another Chinese visiting student.
The bad news is I think it's the American taxpayer who footed the bill for China's technological advance in the field. The good news is, this time it was daylight robbery instead of the more common covert technological espionage by China.

Rare earth production is very wasteful and polluting. Either one adheres to environmental regulation (and to common sanity), in which case production is very expensive. Or one moves production to places without regulation and one pollutes the environment there. That is, move it to China.

Entire US factories have been bought and shipped intact to China. That's fine for the production of plastic toys. But was it all that clever for the production of vital resources? (Not to mention, high-tech weapons systems?)

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[/quote] An important U.S. high-tech manufacturer is shutting down its American operations, laying off hundreds of workers and moving sophisticated equipment now being used to make critical parts for smart bombs to the People's Republic of China [PRC], Insight has learned.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1433243/posts
[/QUOTE]

It will take the world at least fifteen years to rebuild a non-Chinese controlled rare earth industry. All tentative efforts to rebuild a rare earth industry are agressively bullied or bought out by Beijng.

The cornering of the rare earth market was but the first step. Next to controlling the essential resource of high tech industry, is gaining a monopoly on high-tech industry itself.
This has begun. China this year cut exports of rare earths by 25%-75%. Prices have skyrocketed. The only way to circumvent this is...to move the industry and research to China.