How China Weaponised The Resource Curse — And What It Means For India
China deliberately absorbed catastrophic environmental costs to crash rare-earth prices, bankrupting foreign rivals like American company Molycorp and its Mountain Pass mine.
Beijing flooded the rare-earth market in 2011 after Molycorp reopened Mountain Pass, collapsing prices and driving the company into bankruptcy by 2015.
India's clean-energy and defence ambitions depend on the critical mineral supply chain that China controls, yet the country treats the problem as merely economic rather than a national-security issue.
China reversed the resource curse by subsidizing exports, crashing prices, bankrupting competitors, then imposing quotas once the world was hooked on its supply.
A black-market mining frenzy in the 1990s and early 2000s, fueled by CCP corruption and illegal smuggling, depressed global prices and caused ecological disasters from toxic chemical use.
