Fragments
Collection #29
Chris Miller, ‘China’s weaponisation of rare earths is a new kind of trade war’, Financial Times, 8 July 2025:
Still, the most striking aspect of China’s weaponisation of rare earths is how unprepared western governments and companies were. Even those who cannot name a single rare earth element know that China dominates their production. Nevertheless, over the decade and a half since China first cut rare earth exports to Japan in 2011, the west has failed to find new suppliers. Some modest steps were taken. Korea expanded its stockpiles. Japan invested in Australian mines. Yet most western governments devised critical minerals strategies and then chose not to fund them. Manufacturers speak of resilience yet some keep only a week’s supply of rare earth magnets in their inventories. This is a weapon they have been staring at for decades. They should not have been surprised when Beijing finally pulled the trigger.
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Geremie R. Barmé, ‘Tedium to the Left, Tedium to the Right’, China Heritage, 31 October 2025:
We refer both to Xi Jinping’s China and to Trump’s America as ‘empires of tedium’. That is to say, regardless of their formidable strengths, be they overlapping or contrasting, the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America are in a circuit of history from which they both may, eventually, grow out of or escape from. To achieve that velocity of positive change, however, requires the painstaking and tiresome work of facing the tedious realities of the past and the crippling realities of the present. For those mindful of American and Chinese socio-political change over the past sixty years, the recidivism of the 2020s is without question tedious, troubling and tenebrous.
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Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China (1922):
If China were led astray by the lure of brutal power, she might repel her enemies outwardly, but would have yielded to them inwardly. It is not unlikely that the great military nations of the modern world will bring about their own destruction by their inability to abstain from war, which will become, with every year that passes, more scientific and more devastating. If China joins in this madness, China will perish like the rest. But if Chinese reformers can have the moderation to stop when they have made China capable of self-defence, and to abstain from the further step of foreign conquest; if, when they have become safe at home, they can turn aside from the materialistic activities imposed by the Powers, and devote their freedom to science and art and the inauguration of a better economic system—then China will have played the part in the world for which she is fitted, and will have given to mankind as a whole new hope in the moment of greatest need.
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Mathias Larsen, ‘How China’s Growth Model Determines Its Climate Performance’, Carnegie, September 2025:
In terms of climate performance, China is simultaneously the world’s cleanest and dirtiest economy. The country’s record-breaking development of green industries and equally record-breaking greenhouse gas emissions are well known. While this may sound logically incoherent, it is not. It is a natural outcome of China’s growth model. Simply put, both the cleanest and most carbon-intensive industries fit the country’s economic structure.
Ultimately, China’s growth model embraces the scaling up of clean industries just as readily as it resists scaling down carbon-heavy ones – the answer to what might seem like a paradoxical climate performance is, thereby, that both types of industries flourish under China’s growth model. In extension, this explanation leaves no room for the argument that the Chinese government is seriously concerned about climate change. Indeed, according to Climate Action Tracker, China’s climate performance and ambitions are ‘highly insufficient.’ Reflecting this, in spite of the impressive rollout of renewables, China is responsible for 93% of global additional emissions since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015. China’s problematic climate performance suggests an unwillingness to compromise on its growth model for the sake of addressing the climate crisis - while there are no climate deniers in Beijing, there are, indeed, climate neglecters.
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Adam Tooze ‘Chartbook 414: Slouching towards (Red-Green) utopia. Voicing the muted politics of China’s renewable energy revolution’, 2 November 2025:
What is also clear is that wherever it takes place, whether in the West of China, or elsewhere, whether in China or abroad, China’s green energy projects are fully part of an extractivist system of development. Indeed, Chinese energy policy in general over the last half century ought to be understood as the culmination (to date) of that entire historic drama. Never before have so many people undergone such rapid development in such a concentrated and material-intensive form. If the shift to wind, solar and batteries are the next stage of that development process, then once again China is doing it on a scale and pace never before seen. This unarguably has huge implications for land use, for the extraction of key raw materials like lithium, the designation of sacrifice zones etc.
…But extractivism does not equal extractivism. Each energy system is distinctive. Globally, China’s green electrification push is a power move also in the sense that it has the potential to render obsolete large parts of the existing fossil fuel system.
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László Ladány, ‘The Ten Commandments’, China News Analysis, December 1982:
Remember that no one living in a free society ever has a full understanding of life in a regimented society.
Look at China through Chinese spectacles; if one looks at it through foreign glasses, one is thereby trying to make sense of Chinese events in terms of our own problems.
Learn something about other Communist countries.
Study the basic tenets of Marxism.
Keep in mind that words and terms do not have the same meaning in a Marxist society as they do elsewhere.
Keep your common sense: the Chinese may have the particular characteristics of Chinese, but they are human beings, and therefore have normal reactions of human beings.
People are not less important than issues; they are probably more so. A group may adopt the programme of those who oppose it in order to retain power.
Do not believe that you know all the answers. China poses more questions than it provides answers.
Do not lose your sense of humour. A regimented press is too serious to be taken very seriously.
Above all, read the small print!
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Simon Leys, ‘The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past’ (1986), in The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays:
Western visitors in China seem to have been irritated to the point of obsession with what came to be called “Chinese lies” or the “Chinese art of stage-setting and make-believe.” Even intelligent and perceptive observers did not completely escape this trap; in a clever piece written a few years ago by a good scholar, I came across an anecdote which, I think, has a much deeper bearing than the author himself may have realised. A great Buddhist monastery near Nanking was famous for its purity and orthodoxy. The monks were following a rule that conformed strictly to the original tradition of the Indian monasteries: whereas, in other Chinese monasteries, an evening meal is served, in this particular monastery every evening the monks received only a bowl of tea. Foreign scholars who visited the monastery at the beginning of this century much admired the austerity of this custom. These visitors, however, were quite naïve. If they had had the curiosity actually to look into the bowls of the monks, they would have found that what was served under the name of “tea” was in fact a fairly nourishing rice congee, similar in every respect to the food which is being provided at night in all other Chinese monasteries. Only in this particular monastery, out of respect for an ancient tradition, the rice congee was conventionally called “the bowl of tea.”
I wonder if, to some extent, Chinese tradition is not such a “bowl of tea,” which under a most ancient, venerable and constant name can in fact contain all sorts of things, and ultimately anything but tea. Its permanence is first and foremost a permanence of names, covering the endlessly changing and fluid nature of its actual contents.
If this observation is correct, it could also have interesting implications in other areas, and you would naturally be free, for instance, to read in it a forecast regarding the eventual fate of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. This essay, however, was only concerned with China’s past.
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Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2016):
More than a century and a half has passed since the Opium Wars. China has lived through further catastrophes and crises owing to the change of regimes and all manner of experimental reforms. During this time there have been many reflections on the question of technology and modernisation, and the attempt to maintain a dualism between thinking mind and technological instrument has been revealed as a failure. More seriously, in recent decades any such reflection has been rendered impotent in the face of continuing economic and technological booms. A kind of ecstasy and hype has emerged in its stead, propelling the country into the unknown: all of a sudden, it finds itself as if in the midst of an ocean without being able to see any limit, any destination - the predicament described by Nietzsche in The Gay Science, and which remains a poignant image for describing modern man’s troubling situation.
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Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), §124:
In the horizon of the infinite. - We have forsaken the land and gone to sea! We have destroyed the bridge behind us - more so, we have demolished the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean; it is true, it does not always roar, and at times it lies there like silk and gold and dreams of goodness. But there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there - and there is no more ‘land’!