The summit bought a year of time to combat China’s rare earth dominance. India is best positioned to take advantage.
The summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at APEC in Gyeongju produced no grand bargain but one valuable by-product: time. China agreed to delay for one year the latest round of rare‐earth export controls, which Washington feared could strangle defense, clean energy and semiconductor supply chains overnight.
Markets cheered what they saw as a “truce.” But the pause only underscores how precarious global dependence on China remains – and how urgently the world must diversify.
For the past decade, China has maintained a near-monopoly over the rare earth elements that make the modern economy run. It controls roughly 70 percent of global mining, over 90 percent of refining, and almost the entire production of high-performance magnets esse
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