China’s naked weaponisation of rare earths brings to mind Mao Zedong’s ‘four pests’ campaign, the old tyrant’s fanatical effort to exterminate all flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows, which turned into a spectacular piece of self-harm.

Sparrows were always an odd choice of enemy, but Mao and his communist advisers reckoned each one ate four pounds of grain a year and a million dead sparrows would free up food for 60,000 people. The campaign, launched in 1958, saw the extermination of a billion sparrows, driving them to the brink of extinction. But the sparrows also ate insects, notably locusts, whose population exploded, and the ravenous locusts wreaked far more damage to crops than the sparrows ever did, hastening China’s descent into the deadliest famine in human history.

It’s hard not to conclude that western democracies sleepwalked into this crisis

Nobody is expecting a repeat of that tragedy. But the rare earth controls threatened by Beijing, which could cripple advanced western economies, could and should backfire if they finally open western eyes to the need to urgently address dangerous dependencies on China.

Rare earths are a group of 17 elements, until recently little known beyond the chemistry lab, but vital to hi-tech industries ranging from fighter jets, submarines and satellites to mobile phones, electric vehicles, wind turbines and batteries. China controls 61 per cent of the world’s mining and 92 per cent of refining, according to the International Energy Agency.

In an interview last weekend with CBS News’s 60 Minutes, Donald Trump said of the rare earth threat: ‘That’s gone. Completely gone.’ He explained that his moves to impose an additional 100 per cent tariff forced Xi Jinping to back down. In fact, his summit with Xi in South Korea produced a truce at best, and the rare earth controls are merely on hold. It’s a shaky........

© The Spectator