What if China corners the cobalt market?
When it comes to trade war topic these days, most Western commentators completely miss that a trade war is what China was preparing intensively for the last quarter of a century. They well expected an economic pressure on a scale even bigger than what the West puts on North Korea and banana republics. They totally understood that the West will not play nice with them forever.<p>There is zero questions about China&#x27;s economic policy being very strategic, and deliberate. Chinese state conglomerates may look to just littering around the world with money, but analyze it more, and you see a pattern, one that is very much like a game of Go - victory by limiting enemy moves.<p>They buy ally countries, strategically - they buy resource supplying countries, often with major holds on markets of vital commodities.<p>Their tech purchases - mostly underappreciated market leaders with industry wide influence. Kuka - the only company you can say to be Tier 1 in robotics, all other competitors combined will not be an equivalent for it. I has almost complete dominance over major heavy industries. Lattice Semi - the one and only FPGA company that can threaten the Xilinx-Altera duopoly. And so on and on and on.<p>Their domestic tech development - even more so. People talk about China dominating consumer goods manufacturing without realisation that it has even bigger hold of manufacturing machinery industry - manufacturing can&#x27;t really leave China with Chinese made manufacturing equipment being locked down.<p>The whole industry you can call &quot;Manufacturing machinery 2.0&quot; is a domestic Chinese development. Biotech - China quietly ate the market for genetic engineering reagents, as well as much for complex organic chemistry. There are megatons of biotech startups in the West, but they all feel that they will eventually have to move to China to have any chance to scale - effectively they are already a Chinese property.<p>Military allies - well, there things are even more obvious.<p>Major trade agreements - same. Their idea is to bind any major developing market niche to Chinese economy before the West even realizes its emergence.<p>Their idea - to make it so that if somebody wants to do anything any much big being impossible without involving a Chinese company or state institution at some part of the process - to make it &quot;You can&#x27;t do that without China&quot;