Welcome back to CMJ,
Here are the 20-second highlights:
For three years, China quietly rewired how the most-traded commodity on earth gets priced. On June 1, it put that capability on a legal basis and aimed it at critical minerals.
We re-scored every in-scope mineral by buyer exposure instead of supply risk, and the ranking you're used to nearly inverts. The mineral that screens scariest on supply is among the safest here, and one of the ‘safe’ ones is suddenly the most exposed of all.
China spent 2024 on its busiest overseas mining-deal run in more than a decade, picking off small, capital-hungry sellers across Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia. One of those deals quietly killed a Western supply chain before it could form, we name it, and the pattern it fits.
Tungsten is where the doctrine is already live, and the data is startling: one overlooked Western feedstock is being drained at prices up ~350% in a year, while policymakers look the other way. It's the cleanest preview of what's coming for rare earths and cobalt.
Western money is pouring into rare-earth magnets and recycling, a US$1.2bn U.S. plant, and federal awards for pulling rare earths out of waste. The awkward question underneath: as magnet capacity multiplies, is the real bottleneck quietly moving back upstream?
Uranium's real vulnerability was never the mine. It's a chokepoint the West thinned out years ago and now can't rebuild before a 2028 deadline hits, and it may be the cleanest AI-adjacent exposure in the whole complex.
This edition follows the trade to the side almost nobody is watching. For three years, the Western playbook has been built on the supply side: price floors, sovereign equity, and offtake guarantees. China just opened a second front on the demand side, and it is doing it with a working precedent and, now, a law (decree) written for the purpose.
Below, we rebuild the playbook: how a single state buyer, China Mineral Resources Group, went from being built to buy iron ore to setting its price, then decode the decree that just codified the strategy, and re-score every in-scope mineral by its exposure to a coordinated buyer. From there, we follow the same doctrine into tungsten, uranium, and copper, and show where it points next. If you're still valuing ex-China projects by their geology, you're reading the wrong map.
Illustration of China’s CMRG bulk carrier
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