China and the new industrial world order

I was expecting China to make more of an appearance in last night's US Presidential Debate on foreign policy. It's featured already in election coverage so far (mainly around trade and jobs, including some faintly ridiculous remarks Romney made last time about Chinese counterfeit Apple products threatening American jobs), but more seriously there's a palpable sense of fear here in the US about some kind of Chinese global takeover. So it was surprising that neither Obama nor Romney chose to address the issue much.

I wrote a story in the summer, published last month in the Materials Research Society Bulletin in the US, about India's plans to restart mining of rare earth elements (mainly lanthanides and a few other chemical elements, which are crucial to to high-tech electronics and green industries), after a long hiatus prompted by cheap Chinese imports. The crux of the article was that China today controls more than 90% of the world's rare earths market, and in fact this has become such a problem that it created an enormous trade dispute between China and the West. India has become so nervous of China limiting supply of these precious elements that it has taken steps to begin exploration and mining of them again.

The US (like every other country in the world) has pretty much ceded any control it had of rare earth elements to China. And this is just one example of many. In nuclear technology, for instance, China is also rapidly gaining an expertise and independent materials capability of its own. The US has less to fear from American manufacturing jobs moving to China than it has to fear from China quietly and easily dominating industries on which we all rely. Personally, as someone with one foot each in Europe and Asia, I don't have too much of a problem with this new world order. What surprises me is that the US Presidential candidates have so few plans to resist it.