UC Berkeley

Rare earth elements are not rare at all. They are essential for the hardware of contemporary life as we know it, every contemporary industrialized society depends on them, and there are no known alternatives. Yet the geography of their production is strange. In 2009, China accounted for 97% percent of global production, with the majority coming from the Bayan Obo mine operated by the state-owned enterprise Baotou Rare Earth Group on the southern Mongolian steppe. When gradually intensifying export quotas combined with a temporary halt of official exports in 2010, the rest of the world woke up to its near total dependence on China’s rare earth monopoly. To address this crisis, a Brazilian firm (Companhia Brasileira de Metalurgia e Mineração) determined to capture rare earths from its niobium mine tailings in the state of Minas Gerais. Betting on the willingness of downstream firms to pay a premium for non-Chinese rare earths and subsidizing the effort with revenues from their niobium sales, they resolved to produce a steady output of rare earth oxides regardless of global market fluctuations. In 2012, CBMM successfully produced high-purity rare earth oxides. In 2013, the US, EU, and Japan won a WTO case against China’s rare earth export quotas, restoring some semblance of the global status quo. But the story does not end there.

Despite the relative ubiquity of rare earth elements, the abundance of known reserves near existing infrastructure networks, and the dissolution of the 2010 crisis, global prospecting efforts—with the aid of national governments and militaries—have targeted São Gabriel da Cachoeira in the high Amazon and the Western Lunar Highlands on the Moon as the next major points on the global rare earth frontier. This dissertation addresses the question: Given that rare earth elements are both abundant and vital, why is their production driven to so few, seemingly remote places? This question immediately begets three others: through what processes did China’s Bayan Obo mine emerge as the single greatest source of rare earth elements worldwide? What provoked changes in China’s policy and practice, and how did this precipitate spatial transformations elsewhere? And for what purposes are state, military, and private actors pursuing rare earth mining in São Gabriel da Cachoeira and the Moon?

This dissertation proposes that the strange geography of the global rare earth frontier can be explained by world-historical shifts in the global division of toxic labor occurring within a context of state-building and geopolitical contest. It thus advances three claims. First, China’s monopoly emerged through a convergence of long-term historical processes shaping northern China in the context of early 20th century imperialism, Cold War politics, and the epochal global economic shifts precipitated by Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms and the Reagan/Thatcher revolution. Second, the change in China’s political economic priorities from export dominance to conservation has been stimulated by the acute environmental and epidemiological harms generated by rare earth production coupled with China’s changing position in the global division of labor. Third, the contemporary geography of the global rare earth frontier is driven by more than geological determinism: although these sites are rich in rare earth elements, they are also historically contested regions and focal points for territorial agendas, for which a nationalist mandate for rare earth extraction provides a convenient pretext.

These claims are based in a world-historical analysis of rare earth mining, and draw on political economy, political ecology, transnational theory to examine the convergence of Baotou, São Gabriel da Cachoeira, and the Moon in the production of the global rare earth frontier from the late 19th to early 21st century. I engage scientific literatures, archives, expert interviews and other perspectives across the Anglophone, Sinophone, and Lusophone world which were gathered in China, Brazil, and the United States during 2010 – 2014. The multilingual approach is central to this project. Multiple forms of knowledge are evident in the discourses on the rare earth frontier, and there is a symmetrical inaccessibility to the working rationales across language barriers even as these rationales interpenetrate to shape thought and action across global space.

By examining the transnational historical production of the rare earth frontier across these sites, this dissertation refutes three dominant, yet persistent assumptions circulating in contemporary popular, policy, and academic discourse. First, that China’s rare earth monopoly emerged because it possesses more rare earth elements than any other country; second, that China and Brazil possess mutually unintelligible histories precluding grounded relational analyses, and; third, that the Moon is a space of exception, beyond the purview of global economic activities and likewise, therefore, of critical concern.

The purpose of this work is to demystify the contemporary global rare earth frontier. This work therefore has three aims. The first is to equip the reader with a deeper understanding of rare earth elements—the peculiarities of their geology and production, their political economic significance and their role in geopolitics far beyond what is available in the flurry of reports and opinion pieces generated since 2009. The second is to interrogate the historical origins and ongoing ramifications of the recent ‘crisis’ not as an exceptional circumstance, but as an episode that can be understood as emerging from and indicative of global development politics. The third and broadest aim is to move beyond entrenched global imaginaries that insist on the mutual unintelligibility of ‘China’ and ‘the West,’ or which seek to explain global changes as a series of unidirectional ‘impacts’ of one place on another, of ‘center’ on ‘periphery,’ (Hart 2002) as exemplified by much recent (but important) work concerned with China and Latin America (Gallagher 2008, García-Herrero 2007, Jenkins 2008, Rodriguez 2006).

Although these sites differ in many important ways, each demonstrates a particular set of frontier attributes drawing especially from their respective histories at the margins of major imperial and territorial powers. These similarities help explain their convergence as points of extraction along the contemporary global rare earth frontier, while their differences account for the temporal and technological relationalities among these three sites in the global division of toxic labor.