China accelerates overseas mining investment to secure critical minerals - Mining.com.au

China's acceleration of critical-minerals acquisition outside its borders directly threatens Australia's Resource Sovereignty (Pillar 1), since Australia is a major global supplier of lithium, rare earths, and other minerals essential to energy transition and defence. If China secures upstream and downstream processing capacity in third countries, it reduces Australia's pricing power, market access, and geopolitical leverage, whilst simultaneously weakening Australia's ability to decouple from Chinese supply-chain dependency.