Chinese companies are the largest shareholders in two Australian mines producing minerals vital for Beijing’s hypersonic missiles and nuclear programs, helping it overcome “severe challenges” to accessing key resources.
In a rare admission of its vulnerability, China says it depends on imports for its supply of zirconium, a little-known critical mineral. Australia is the world’s largest producer and supplies China with 41 per cent of its imports.
Not only did Australian regulators allow Beijing-backed companies to become major shareholders in the two Western Australia mines, the federal government even gave one of them a $160 million soft loan to help it into production.
Australia is supplying these raw materials vital for China’s military build-up, while at the same time signing up to be a partner of choice for the United States as it seeks to break Beijing’s stranglehold over the processing of rare earths and critical minerals.
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Why would they? And how would they hope to maintain supply lines across thousands of kilometres of open ocean and then hostile terrain??? Unlike France, the US or the UK, China is not a current or former colonial superpower with military bases all over the planet, so almost all their aircraft and ships would have to come all the way over from China for every trip. The fuel costs of a sustained invasion and subsequent occupation would be staggering. What would they want that could possibly be worth that kind of attrition hell that they couldn’t get for so much less trouble by just trading for it?
Yeah okay, if it happened, and if they were prepared to throw as many resources into the meat grinder as it’d take, China would probably ‘win,’ but that doesn’t mean that we’ve got any reason to believe this has any chance of actually happenning because it’s so pointlessly stupid.