Ep 95 - China’s critical minerals off switch isn’t as ironclad as Washington thinks

About this episode

During Xi Jinping’s late-September visit to Washington, the US and China extended their trade truce – but more than a month later, there’s still no Federal Register notice or amended MofCom announcement formalizing it. • Jessica DiCarlo, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Utah, calls this “managed interdependence,” not de-escalation. • And she says the idea that Beijing can simply flip an on-off switch on minerals processing and shipments underappreciates the complexity of the sector’s regulation in China. On this latest episode of the Trivium China Podcast, host Andrew Polk and special co-host Cory Combs (Trivium’s Head of Supply Chain and Critical Minerals Research) sit down with Jess (a scholar and co-founder of the Second Cold War Observatory) to unpack: • Why China’s rare earth sector is regulatorily “fractured,” and how local officials, provinces, and firms – not just Beijing – shape what actually gets mined and shipped • Why processing, not mining, is China’s genuine chokepoint • How cobalt underscores the deep interconnection between China and other countries (e.g. the DRC) in the minerals space: about 96% of Congolese cobalt goes to China for proces