China invests in rare earth education to secure critical mineral supply chains amid global tech competition
Original framing: “A bachelor’s in rare earths? In China, there are schools for that - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Rare earths are critical for high-tech industries, but their extraction involves toxic chemicals like sulfuric acid and radioactive thorium, posing severe health risks. China dominates 80% of global supply due to its centralized industrial policy and lax environmental regulations, not just technical prowess. Scientific literature increasingly warns of 'peak rare earths' within decades if recycling and substitution aren’t prioritized.
China’s rare earth education programs are not an anomaly but a symptom of a global system that treats minerals as disposable inputs for infinite growth, while outsourcing the costs to marginalized communities and ecosystems.
The West’s mockery of China’s 'bachelor’s in rare earths' obscures its own role in this extractive cycle, from Silicon Valley’s reliance on Congolese cobalt to Europe’s lagging recycling infrastructure. Indigenous cosmologies and decolonial economics offer a radical alternative: treating rare earths as part of a sacred commons, not a state-controlled resource. The solution lies in reconfiguring education to serve ecological and communal health, not industrial throughput—a shift that requires dismantling the power structures of both Chinese state capitalism and Western techno-utopianism. The future of rare earths is not in digging deeper holes but in weaving networks of reciprocity, where universities train stewards, not scavengers, and where technology serves life, not extraction.