In their article centered on the domestic woes of the People’s Republic of China’s automobile industry, the news writers had this claim:
Beijing shows little sign of doing anything about its car mess, partly because it doesn’t enjoy full control. Local government officials who promoted car manufacturing are reluctant to pull the plug, said Tu Le, managing director of consultant Sino Auto Insights.
That’s partly true, but it’s erroneous to assume it’s the only factor. PRC Electric Vehicle exports are hammering the European auto industry, and it’s getting into Canadian auto industry. The US auto industry is getting hammered, albeit not as extremely, by the tariffs imposed in an effort to protect it from PRC auto imports.
This hammering is part of a sub rosa two-pronged assault on the West. One prong is holding Western industry hostage to PRC control over rare earths—both of the ores and of the capacity to process them into finished items. The other prong is to deindustrialize the West by pushing hard goods—not just battery cars—into Western markets at prices and in volumes that Western nations cannot match, inducing those populations to buy PRC goods in preference. The domestic auto industry kerfuffle is a price the PRC is willing to pay in order to achieve its aim of dominance over the US and over the West in general.
This is a long-term threat to Western security, but there’s a near-term security threat, also. As WWII demonstrated, a viable automobile manufacturing facility is at the core of the ability of a nation to produce its military establishment’s combat vehicles and related weapons systems.
There is a solution to this, which itself involves addressing both prongs. One facet is to take advantage of the PRC’s domestic industrial strait and either impose very high tariffs on all imports originating from the PRC, regardless of the path those imports take between the PRC and the final destination, or outright boycott all PRC products. Either would limit PRC sales to its already paltry and declining domestic market.
The other prong is to get off the dime and move to develop Western rare earth mining—there are a plethora of rare earth ore regions throughout North America, for instance, and on the accessible sea bottoms of the eastern Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea—and processing facilities, thereby eliminating the PRC-controlled bottleneck and associated fist on the throat of Western industry. In parallel, or at least in tight sequence, that rare earth supply chain adjustment should be extended to supply chains for all Western manufacturing and assembly facilities, removing all dependence on PRC supply.
Of course, this solution will be extremely expensive to bring about, especially were the PRC to cut off access to its rare earth output—as seems likely, along with restrictions on other supply chain materials—in response to moves to develop non-PRC accesses. That effects of that cutoff would last, though, only until Western accesses come on line. The relatively shorter-term cost, too, must be compared with the longer-term cost of PRC dominance over the US and the West and our remnant industrial output.