[snowrip]

China owns the rights to 96% of the entire planet’s rare mineral mines. Sure, there are others places to mine them, but damn few.

I was wondering how long it was going to take them to pull the rare earth carrot; turns out it was much, much sooner than I expected.

[glorgau]

Ditto, they played this card in a rather low importance scenario. The Chinese must not play poker.

[lbryce]

Talk about using an atom bomb to kill a fly. The analogy is not quite symmetrical, congruent but it does illustrate the dismay in which, as you've expressed so very well, the carrot was pulled so very early in the game so very clumsily, I might add.