Are rare earth minerals China's trump card in its trade war with US?

China has been signalling that it may restrict the export of rare earth minerals to the United States as the trade conflict between the two countries escalates.

Here is the BBC world News article = [bbc.com]

One can only hope that the disaster in the oval office will (eventually) leave that office - for good - and we can begin to "right the ship". Set about undoing all the damage he will have done during his reign of terror.....I think most of the European leaders are counting on things going back to a more normal state in the future...

I wonder just what the availability of these are in asteroids.

And US thinks they can do without them.

hmmm, if they held back on the gadolinium (Gd) maybe the evangelicals would awaken from their stupor.

I'm really okay with discontinuing the use of those items.
If we can't figure out another way of doing things without them, perhaps
we should just learn to live without the products they're used in.
Technology isn't always a "good" thing.

We've got some really bright people, someone should be able to figure out
how to get around it all.

If these are heavily in the manufacture of computers, then our out of date computers contain a lot .

I would need to double check sources, but I believe there is a single mine in California that produces rare earth metals. We have the resources reserves in the US but we are not exploiting them because importing has always been cheaper due to the massive startup costs and relatively low yield.

Edit: there are several in the US but only the Mountain pass mine owned by Molycorp is profitable. Here is a depressing article about why it is failing anyways. [hcn.org]

That is one of the reasons we are staying Afghanistan!

One of the reasons China invaded Tibet!

There are supplies of these minerals on the sea floor and in asteroids, I hope the race to space wins, because mining the sea floor will be another environmental disaster.

Sooner or later Angry Orange Moron will give in, lift the ban on Huawei, declare victory after gaining nothing and move on...

The operative word is "produces'. There are other deposits elsewhere, but mainly in "less than savoury" nations.