At a sprawling industrial complex in the Inner Mongolian city of Baotou, workers feed bag after bag of rare earth additives into roaring furnaces, turning ordinary steel into a high-performance alloy worth twice as much.
This is the front line of a technological leap being powered by China’s dominance in critical minerals and its strategic industrial policy.
The advanced rare earth steel being produced is used in the country’s most ambitious engineering projects – from high-speed railways to…

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