Well I was in the mining industry, in a service capacity. The company sold equipment to China mining companies to actually do this stuff, and included analysing and improving mining and mining refinement processes. It didn't matter the mineral/element they were targeting, we had equipment to make it happen.

The tech was never theirs, in a mining (start to finish) capacity. It was already western, they bought it. And like all good chinese companies, they then copied it and made half arsed versions of it. They even had the audacity to buy our parts that were proprietary, that they simply could not make immediately (I assume they worked it out eventually).

Interestingly, Gallium and Germanium were used in our old technologies that we sold to them. Our new tech doesn't need either of those. So any Rare Earth processing they have was derived from what the west had already achieved.

Unfortunately its the access to the actual mined elements that we want to consume that is the problem, its not the tech they stole from us in the first place.

I don't know anything about their Covid-19 gene editing splice kits, but I wouldn't trust their LIDAR. Probably burn you (or the pedestrian in front of you) retinas out!

Rare earths... Is this why China seems to be upping their territorial dispute with Philippine? Because the seafloor on that region is supposed to be rich with rare earths?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Chinese state media reports the update includes items Beijing feels should not be freely exported in order to safeguard China's "economic and technological rights and interests."

Analysis from outside China suggests the expanded list bans tech for making rare-earth magnets, mining rare earths, and refining the substances.

China is currently the world's dominant source of the substances, and has long pursued a policy of local value-adding by refining the stuff and/or building it into useful components rather than shipping raw product offshore.

That policy has given Beijing leverage over important supply chains – power it displayed in July 2023 when it restricted the export of Gallium and Germanium, which are required for semiconductor manufacturing.

China's refreshed export ban list also added cell cloning and gene editing tech intended for human use for the first time.

So did LiDAR – a move that looks very much like a tit-for-tat action after US lawmakers recently called for bans on exports so that China can't use American-made tech to build autonomous systems.

The original article contains 359 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 53%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!