Chinese companies use rare earths ban to squeeze out foreign rivals - AFR

China's use of rare-earths export restrictions as economic coercion directly undermines Australian resource sovereignty (Pillar 1) and exposes critical vulnerabilities in defence-industrial supply chains for advanced weapons, sensors, and electronics. This accelerates Australia's need for domestic rare-earths processing capacity and allied alternatives, raising the cost and timeline of decoupling from Chinese value-chains and amplifying the strategic risk of economic interdependence during kinetic scenarios.