CHINA AND THE FOREIGN MEDIA
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#1 RARE EARTHS – IS CHINA TOO FAR AHEAD?
SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
#2 PORNOGRAPHY IN CHINA
THE UK GUARDIAN
#3 CHINA AND JACK PERRY – PART 7
GRAHAM PERRY
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#1 RARE EARTHS – IS CHINA TOO FAR AHEAD?
SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
“Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once said that “the Middle East has oil, China has rare earths”. His words carry new weight today as China’s stranglehold over the rare earths supply chain gives it leverage in the trade war with the United States.
China controls some 60% of global mining of rare earths, over 85% of their processing, and more than 90% of permanent magnet production – used in everything from cars to medical devices and wind turbines.
That leaves the US and other Western nations vulnerable, and many are now scrambling to diversify their supply chains away from China.
Analysts say that while there are multilateral efforts under way to reduce reliance on China they are largely diplomatic, and there is a lack of investment or technical expertise to move away from Chinese supply.
They also say that developing countries with rare earths are emerging as the new front line of a high-stakes contest between China and the West.
China has a stranglehold over the rare earths supply chain.”
GRAHAM PERRY COMMENTS;-
The U.S. is fighting back but solutions are for Tomorrow, whereas China’s threat of export controls is for Today.
- The U.S. has accelerated its “mine to magnets” initiative to develop a fully domestic rare earths supply chain – from sourcing and separation to processing, metallisation, alloying and magnet production.
- In 2023, the U.S. invested US$258 million in Lynas Rare Earths – the only non-Chinese commercial-scale producer – to open a production facility in Texas. The Australian company achieved a milestone in May this year by producing the heavy rare earth dysprosium oxide at its Malaysian plant – the first time it has been done commercially outside China.
- In 2022 the U.S. launched the Minerals Security Partnership with 14 partners including Japan, South Korea, India, Britain and Australia. Resource-rich countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Greenland, Kazakhstan and Ukraine are involved in project development and policy dialogue as forum members.
- In June, the Group of Seven unveiled a new action plan on critical minerals. And a Quad initiative was launched in July to diversify the critical minerals supply chain.
But analysts say these efforts will not be enough to challenge Beijing’s long-standing dominance of the industry. Multilateral initiatives, like the G7, the Quad and the Minerals Security Partnership “are still largely in a diplomatic stage,” said Gracelin Baskaran, Director of the CSIS Critical Minerals Security Programme. And, additionally, environmental concerns are a significant restraint on development.
Jonathan Hykawy, President of Stormcrow Capital, a Canada-based equity research firm specialising in rare earths, said China could offer more to the 14 partners than the US, including the size of its market and geopolitical stability. “The current American presidential administration seems to be using uncertainty and turmoil as some sort of negotiating tactic, but it is difficult to make spending decisions in the face of uncertainty,” he said.
Baskaran noted that developing a rare earths industry required significant capital and technical expertise. She said many emerging economies were “non-aligned and looking for the best deal and thus willing to work with China or the West”.
Vietnam holds the world’s second-largest known reserves of rare earth minerals, accounting for 19 per cent of global deposits – second only to China. And in 2023, Vietnam and the US signed an agreement to boost technical cooperation on rare earths with the aim of strengthening the Vietnamese industry and attracting foreign investment. But China’s Rare Earth Group are working with Vietnam’s mining giant Vinacomin and Beijing and Hanoi issued a joint statement in April saying they would explore cooperation on critical minerals.
Malaysia’s Foreign Minister in April announced that China had agreed to share some of its processing technology with Malaysia.
Myanmar (Burma), meanwhile, is the world’s third-largest source of rare earths after China and the US. Its Kachin region is home to some of the world’s biggest mines for heavy rare earths, which are exported to China for processing. At the same time the U.S. – if it became active in Myanmar – would have to engage in negotiations with the ethnic rebel groups that control much of Myanmar’s rare earth reserves.
Jonathan Hykawy has noted that Myanmar and other developing countries were becoming more important as the US-led West and China both sought rare earths. “[Myanmar] pertains to the supply of the heavy rare earths such as dysprosium and terbium, which are important to the manufacture of NdFeB magnets that can be used at higher temperatures, as needed in the automotive industry,” he said.
Rare earths are used in everything from smartphones to wind turbines and China is letting it be known to the U.S. in recent Tariff discussions in London, Geneva and Stockholm that it has productive muscle.
But China is aware that its significant advantage is time limited. As Hykawy has noted;- “The actual deposits, the separation technology, the knowledge regarding making rare earth metals, alloys and magnets – all these exist outside China. Putting all this into commercial-scale production is a matter of time and money,” he said.
China, for the forseeable future, is well ahead. Building alternative supply chains is far more complex than just identifying new mine sites – it requires a system of processing facilities, manufacturing capabilities and technical expertise, and Western efforts to close the gap even over the longer term may not succeed.
China’s dominance in rare earths has been built up over decades of strategic investment and it may be too far ahead. This has real significance for China’s place in world affairs.
GRAHAM PERRY
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#2 PORNOGRAPHY IN CHINA
THE U.K. GUARDIAN AND
THE SOUTHERN CHINESE METROPOLIS DAILY
“Anger is growing on Chinese social media after news reports revealed the existence of online groups, said to involve hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, that share photographs of women, including sexually explicit images, taken without their consent.
The Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily published a report last week about a group on the encrypted messaging app Telegram called “MaskPark tree hole forum”. It said it had more than 100,000 members and was “made up entirely of Chinese men”. Men reportedly shared sexually explicit images of women either in intimate settings or with so-called “pinhole cameras” that can be hidden in everyday items such as plug sockets and shoes. Telgram is blocked in China but can be accessed by using a virtual private network (VPN) which circumvents location controls.
In China the penalty for taking pictures of someone without consent is up to 10 days imprisonment and a fine of 500 yuan (£53). People who dissemble pornographic material can be jailed for up to two years”
GRAHAM PERRY COMMENTS;-
Southern Metropolis Daily (SMD) is reported on Google to be a for-profit tabloid newspaper located in Guangzhou city, China, and its circulation is throughout the greater Guangdong and Pearl River Delta region. SMD is a constituent of the Nanfang Media Group, which is under the supervision of the Guangdong committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The newspaper publishes daily, with 72 pages and multiple sections relating to consumer products, international affairs, sports, and other topics of the public interest.
SMD is best known for its investigative reporting. It has been involved in multiple scandals and controversies. Its best-known controversy is the publishing of the ‘Sun Zhigang incident’ which resulted in the repeal of the force repatriation law. This publishing also resulted in the imprisonment of SMD journalists Cheng Yizhong, Li Minying, and Yu Huafeng. SMD’s motto is “writing for the people.” In 2005, Cheng Yizhong was the laureate of the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize for his resistance to Chinese censorship laws and police corruption.
Southern Metropolis Daily (SMD) was first created in 1995. It is located in the Guangzhou City of the greater Guangdong and Pearl River Delta area. It was first established as a weekly newspaper under the name Southern weekly. It was created as a constituent branch of the Nanfang media group, all of which are a part of the Southern Media Group.
The name Southern Metropolis was extended to Southern Metropolis Daily in 1997 by The Nanfang Media Group, by which it was also established as a tabloid media form. SMD competes with other daily newspapers in the Guangdong region; including but not limited to Information Times, Southern Weekly, Yangcheng Evening News and Guangzhou Daily.
The SMD headquarters were created in 1997, located in Guangzhou China which is where it still resides. SMD is written in simplified Mandarin. SMD has a reported circulation of 1.845 million people and is ranked first amongst all local newspapers in the city of Guangzhou.
Readers of Good Morning From London will be surprised that SMD (Southern Metropolis Daily) is a for-profit tabloid; is located in China; is distributed in Guangzhou Province and the Pearl River Delta; is published daily; is 72 pages long; is under the supervision of Guangdong Committee of the Communist Party of China; has received awards for its work in resisting censorship laws and in exposing police corruption; is ranked first among all local newspapers in Guangzhou and has a circulation of 1.8m people.
But according to conventional Western thinking China does not have for-profit newspapers that rank first among local newspapers and are known for their exposure of police corruption. This is not how it is meant to be. After all, to the Western observer, China is a totalitarian state with no role for independent initiative or free expression. And readers will also be surprised that the paper has taken the lead in exposing the existence in China of pornographic web sites.
So how authoritarian is China? How free are the media if publications with this investigative goal and purpose are able to reach 1.8m readers on a daily basis? Are we doing a good job here in the UK of really understanding the scale of the changes taking place in China?
Bear in mind the statistic produced by the Hong Kong based Lau Institute – with which Professor Kerry Brown is associated – that the U.K. has the highest rating in Europe for its negative media about China.
Readers may also be surprised to learn that China does have a pornographic element in its people’s life style. But readers should not be surprised. China does have crime and drugs and sexual exploitation. It also has corruption on a personal and political level. China has repeatedly publicised the examples of corruption in high places and there have been reports of prominent people being removed from public roles if found to have engaged in disreputable behaviour – see the recent scandal of the female tennis player and her affair with a leading politician (who was removed from office)
The West likes to bad mouth China for its political choices and is quick to use any item of news to discredit the society China is building. The negativism in the U.K. media about China should alert readers to the need to be circumspect about the information that the media outlets provide. Just bear in mind the one statistic from Travelux – who organise the availability of foreign currency for world wide tourists – that 200 million Chinese citizens are predicted to travel to foreign countries in 2030.
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#3 CHINA AND JACK PERRY – PART 7
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF 1952
Part 6 of the China and Jack Perry narrative concluded as follows;
“ It was during the Conference that Jack was approached by Dr Ji who was Vice-President of the Bank of China and Mr Lu Hsuchang, the General Manager of the China National Import and Export Corporation (CNIEC) Import and Export Corporation. They knocked on his hotel room and made a proposal which had significant consequences for China-UK relations and also for Jack’s commercial career. They wanted him to set up an independent company in London to promote trade between China and the U.K.”
A word about Dr Ji who Jack described as “the real powerhouse behind the Chinese delegation. He was a man of immense experience in China and the United States and figured in many delicate circumstances, particularly when he was Secretary to Hi Hikin who was the Kuomintang’s Minister of Finance. A man of considerable education and erudition – he was Professor of Economic History at Chicago University. After Liberation in 1949, Dr Ji was Prime Minister Zhou Enlai’s principal adviser on foreign trade acting as Zhou’s unofficial Trade Ambassador. I learned more about China from Ji than from any other source. He took me in hand and taught me at length on the history, science and culture of the country. My debt to Ji is inestimable. For me he characterised China. In the Chinese Delegation he was both ideas man and organiser.”
On the morning of 11th April 1952, as the Moscow International Economic Conference was drawing to a close, Jack took a phonecall in his hotel room from Dr Ji suggesting a meeting with him, Lu Hsuchang and Shi Chiang. At the meeting, Lu took the lead and said China was one of the poorest countries in the world. Up to the sixteenth century China was probably the most advanced scientifically and culturally. With the invasion from the Northern Marches in the late seventeenth century China’s progress was halted and disintegrated rapidly under the influence of backward feudalism.
Mr Lu continued – “the vast majority of the population, the peasantry, became serfs and were dominated by a greedy landlord class. Illiteracy, disease, famine and poverty were the condition of the people of China.”
Lu explained that the 1911 revolution, that ended the rule by monarchy, brought little economic relief particularly when Chiang Kaishek succeeded Sun Yatsen in 1925. The Kuomintang, under his leadership, pursued a reign of terror engaging the newly formed Communist Party in a bloody civil war which was finally ended in 1949 by the People’s Liberation Army and the declaration by Mao Tsetung of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China.
The new China was starting from a very low level and it would take many generations to turn China into a semi-modern country. He stressed that the leadership of the Communist Party was charged with the responsibility of building the new China “in very adverse circumstances”.
Lu continued with his sweep of Chinese history and observed that the Korean War had ended in a stalemate and that the U.S. hoped to paralyse the new China by making it an economic outcast “a trade pariah and to make all trade between the U.S. and China illegal”.
China, Lu informed, had established friendly relations with India, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan and Burma but with the exception of Switzerland China had no diplomatic relations with any other Western country. The Moscow Conference was a demonstration of opposition to the U.S. led blockade policy.
With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the era of National Humiliation had come to an end and the power of the U.S. the U.K. Japan, Germany, France Holland and Belgium was terminated. China trade was now organised by the Party with the creation of State Corporations under the leadership of Ministry of Foreign Trade. Lu made clear that his organisation – the China National Import and Export Corporation – was responsible for foreign trade at a juncture when foreign trade was “an absolute necessity”. But China faced weaknesses – selling into foreign markets was new; they lacked experience in trade techniques; they were unfamiliar with payment procedures, insurance, shipping, banking, contracts and legal processes. There was little commercial law in China.
Lu continued with his comprehensive analysis of the big challenges that faced China and then said “I now come to the main purpose of this meeting. We wish to propose that you set up a company in London for the prime and exclusive purpose of trading with China. We want to see an important, significant company performing substantial trade – independent and profitably. This is not a sudden thought on our part. We have considered this idea since we met together in the preparation for this Conference.”
PART 8 – JACK’S REACTION IN 1952 TO LU HSUCHANG’S WORDS
GRAHAM PERRY
