Sirens wail every couple of days on the outskirts of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Citizens immediately stop whatever they’re doing and race to shelters. Their lives might depend on it—explosives are about to detonate in the region’s open-pit copper and cobalt mine. Rocks propelled from these explosions have been known to punch through walls and roofs and sometimes kill people. Local protests stand little chance: the mine is operated by the Jinchuan Group, a Chinese company, and it is considered a project of national importance to the DRC. Copper and cobalt are both critical minerals feeding the green-tech revolution, and as Chinese President Xi Jinping prophesied at a COP summit in 2021: “Clear waters and green mountains are mountains of silver and gold.”

Like spice in the Age of Discovery, and oil over the past two centuries, the critical mineral trade is reshaping the global economy. And one state appears to have grasped this fact earlier than anyone else. Today, Beijing controls nickel mines stretching the length of Southeast Asia, cobalt pits throughout Africa’s central states, and a string of lithium sites from Argentina to Zimbabwe to southwest Australia. Chinese projects girdle the globe.

The CCP has also spent the past fifty years investing in a subcategory of the critical mineral list: the select group of seventeen silvery-white elements called “rare earths.” Beijing needs to ransack the planet for lithium, copper, and cobalt, but when it comes to rare earths, it can rely on natural reserves back home—about half the world’s supply, much of it in a single vast lode. “The Middle East has oil,” said Deng Xiaoping, the country’s leader in the 1980s, “[but] China has rare earth metals.”

The Party has built on this fortuitous head start, growing to dominate every part of the industry. Chinese companies craft the infrastructure and command the supply chains—the alchemical rituals necessary to transform these metals into Xi’s “mountains of silver and gold.” Today, China produces 69 percent of global rare-earth ores, carries out ninety percent of global rare-earth processing, produces ninety percent of the world’s rare-earth magnets, and processes 99 percent of the world’s “heavy” rare-earth metals (a tax dispute recently stalled production at the Vietnam refinery accounting for the remaining one percent, so for the time being, the figure is actually 100 percent).

For decades, Western powers mostly sat back and watched. There was sufficient public awareness of the danger for popular culture to tune in—the 2012 video game Call of Duty: Black Ops II depicted an African war prompted by Chinese rare-earth dominance. But little action was taken, probably due to the widespread conviction that the PRC would become a liberal democracy sooner or later, and therefore China’s long-term strategic advantage would pose a minimal threat.

Western progress was also stalled by fears over radioactive waste. Rare earths are abundant and easy to find (despite their name), but difficult to extract. They require “cracking and leaching”—a costly and messy set of operations in which acid is used to break down the mineral structures and then separate elements from their ore. The process blights the landscape. Water supplies across China are now contaminated; soil can no longer support crops. The country’s mineral-rich regions are also home to its “cancer villages.”

According to the Chinese Society of Rare Earths:

Every ton of rare earth produced generates approximately 8.5 kilograms (18.7 lbs) of fluorine and 13 kilograms (28.7 lbs) of dust; and using concentrated sulfuric acid high temperature calcination techniques to produce approximately one ton of calcined rare earth ore generates 9,600 to 12,000 cubic meters (339,021 to 423,776 cubic feet) of waste gas containing dust concentrate, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide, and sulfuric acid, approximately 75 cubic meters (2,649 cubic feet) of acidic wastewater, and about one ton of radioactive waste residue (containing water).

Writer Tim Maughan put the point in more lyrical terms, as he looked out over a bubbling lake of toxic waste in China’s north, so large that it’s visible by satellite:

Dozens of pipes line the shore, churning out a torrent of thick, black, chemical waste from the refineries that surround the lake. The smell of sulphur and the roar of the pipes invades my senses. It feels like hell on Earth.

Once fields of wheat and corn, these black lakes are the by-product of cerium and neodymium extraction: a process that destroys farmland, compromises waterways, and poisons local populations. Nevertheless, the CCP has forged ahead, mastering and monopolising the rare-earth industry, and creating a potent trade weapon for itself in the process.

Thus far, the weapon has barely been used. (One obvious reason is that China reimports the finished products made with its rare earths overseas.) But there is plenty of room for carefully targeted punishment. In early April, Donald Trump’s tariff escalations prompted the Chinese Ministry of Commerce and General Administration of Customs to announce export controls on seven rare earths: samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium. The move was tentative—a requirement that exporters enter a complex application process for licences rather than an outright ban on shipments, and a limitation on certain rare earths but not others. Nevertheless, this is going to hurt. The restrictions apply to all countries, not just the United States, and we need China’s supply.

The “vitamins of industry,” the “oil of the digital age”—rare earths attract no end of showy metaphors, and with good reason. April’s list contains elements used in smartphones, AI servers, MRI scanners, electric cars, and more. Beijing has targeted the “heavy” to “medium” rare earths necessary for high-performance magnets, knowing that auto companies’ current stockpiles of those magnets will only last three to six months. China’s trade partners are effectively held hostage.

From a Western perspective, much now depends on the hasty expansion of Australia’s Lynas, the biggest non-Chinese rare-earths producer, which hopes to begin processing in the Malaysian city of Kuantan by mid-2025, and in Texas by 2026. The US Department of Defense wants “a sustainable, mine-to-magnet supply chain capable of supporting all US defense requirements by 2027.”

Looking a little further ahead, we can see that a major change is already underway. New mining frontiers are opening up in Greenland, Brazil, Tanzania, and Australia. A study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences found that China’s share of the global rare-earth supply will actually plummet to 28 percent by 2035. In no time at all, historically speaking, Beijing’s advantage will disappear. The dynamic is a familiar one—think of the Chinese army’s military prowess, or China’s demographic dividend. Wherever we look, we find the CCP fast approaching the end of a historic period of dominance.

This is a relief, but it is also a concern. The Party has just a few more years in which it can hold the world to ransom over rare earths. Now is the time for Xi to press that advantage. This brings us to Taiwan. While the rare earths on Beijing’s export-control list have a variety of applications, one common theme crops up again and again. Yttrium prevents jet engines from melting mid-flight. Terbium helps radar systems to detect approaching submarines. Dysprosium is used in magnets that ensure anti-ship missiles reach their target accurately. Surveillance systems, aircraft carriers, night-vision devices, gamma-ray detectors, missile casings—the point is not a subtle one. If China invades Taiwan, Beijing could expand its restricted rare-earth list, upending civilian lives in numerous ways while also compromising American war-fighting capacity. By 2035, it will no longer be able to do this.

Will there be a war? Nothing is certain. Out there in the pivotal zone, however, the strain is telling. In March, a Chinese trawler struck a Taiwanese Navy vessel in the Strait, 45 nautical miles from Taiwan’s west coast (luckily, no one was killed). Tensions extend below the surface of the water. Just days before the collision, Beijing had revealed a deep-sea cable-cutting device apparently capable of operating at 4,000 metres below sea level. That’s twice the maximum depth of the armoured communication and power lines it will doubtless be used to target. The device is ostensibly for “civilian salvage” and “seabed mining,” but there can be few who take such pronouncements seriously. Chinese ships have cut Taiwanese and Baltic cables in recent months.

The CCP’s preparations are evident in Taiwan itself. Fifth columnists are found throughout society, all the way up to the president’s office. Three soldiers in charge of the president’s security were recently convicted of spying for China, along with a fourth individual from the defence ministry’s information and telecommunications command. Meanwhile, several Chinese citizens have been deported from Taiwan after posting content calling for forced unification—an escalation on the part of the Taiwanese authorities, and a sign of how seriously they now take the threat.

We can see something similar a few hundred kilometres north. Having just re-organised its air, ground, and maritime self-defence forces into a single Joint Operations Command, Tokyo is preparing plans to evacuate its citizens from Okinawa, the Japanese island that sits halfway between Taiwan and mainland Japan. Tokyo pretends the plan is not aimed at any particular scenario. Okinawa, however, is the site of an American military base, which will become a prime target in any Taiwan conflict. Evacuation drills begin early next year.

And the United States? It’s confusing. J.D. Vance may have publicly downplayed the China threat, but according to a classified internal guidance memo, the Pentagon is fully focused on Taiwan, and ready to sacrifice other objectives in the process. In this memo, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth is quoted as calling China the “sole pacing threat,” and prevention of the seizure of Taiwan the “sole pacing scenario.” Hegseth visited Japan in March and declared the creation of a new “war-fighting headquarters” in the country. On 14 April, Trump floated the threat of new pharmaceutical tariffs to reduce reliance on China “in case of war.” And for all the media focus on Musk’s potentially compromising China ties, it’s SpaceX that will soon carry the new Astranis internet satellite into geostationary orbit above Taiwan. There it will hang in the heavens; a precaution against the digital blackout that would likely follow an invasion of the island.

Perhaps this was the reality behind Washington’s chaos and noise of recent months—the whiplash-inducing tariff conflict; the dramatic cuts to government spending; the public humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the apparent willingness to let Putin have whatever Putin wants (while Trump eyed up trillions of dollars’ worth of untapped Ukrainian lithium and rare earth supplies). All realpolitik, all preparation for a coming showdown in the East.

Whatever the truth, decoupling from China—in strategic areas like the rare-earth industry—has never been so urgent. We have left it perilously late. Now we find ourselves doomed to navigate the most dangerous decade since the Cold War, before reaching what will hopefully be the calmer waters of the 2030s.