China'S Critical Mineral Resource Strategies For The Technologies Of The Future

Globalization favoured China and China knew how to best capitalize on the opportunity, becoming the main beneficiary of this globally unfolding process. During the recent few decades, the setup of international production into global value chains (GVC) on cost-optimization criteria and the massive relocation to Asia of the Western industries entailed by that process, have transformed China into the largest world industrial producer (2010) and, implicitly, into the largest importer and consumer of mineral resources, as well as, in the absence of restrictive national regulations, into the planet's largest polluter. The need to supply large quantities of resources to an economy the size and scope of the Chinese one, corelated with its pre-existing practice of macroeconomic planning and with the ancestral tradition of approaching matters in a long-term strategic vision, have all determined China’s early concern for ensuring the access to the necessary mineral resources for its manufacturing industry and, specifically, for its developing high-tech ones, and have led to designing long-term strategies in this regard. This paper looks at China’s critical mineral resources strategies, their implementation results and global consequences.