Bayan Obo Rare Earth Mine, Inner Mongolia, China

The Bayan Obo Rare Earth Mine seen from sattelite. It is responsible for nearly half of the worlds rare earth production.

This week in Concepts, Culture & Communication we were invited to study the “Anatomy of an AI” map (part of the MoMA collection!). The artists Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler tried to caputre as many systems, individuals, and processes that are involved in a single technological product. In this case, the smart speaker Amazon Alexa. The map goes from grand geological processes to the end users “hey alexa’ prompt, and (ostensibly) everything in between.

The most surprising thing that I learned in this process was that China accounts for over 95% of the world’s production of rare earth materials - desipite purportedly only containing 36 percent rare earth deposits. These heavy metals are called ‘rare’ because of their extraction difficulty, and are used in virtually every technological device today. Learning this fact set me down a rabbit hole to learn how this came to pass, and the implications it has had on China, and the rest of the world.

Xu Guangxian (who attended graduate school in NYC just like me!) was the foremost rare earth scientst in China - both in the scientific and political advancement of the industry. The funding invested into the research and businesses allowed for great technological advancements and manufacturing that benefitted people worldwide, especially in the west where consumers had money to indulge more frequenetly in new electronic devices. The country built up deep institutional knowledge and became host to the foremose research and tecniques for rare earth extraction. And after decades of collaboration with other world powers, China began restricting intellectual and physical exports - as a strategic play of controlling and cornering the rapidly rising demand.

This caused a number of downsteam effects - sometimes literally as wastewater from treatment plants were dumped into local rivers. Other countries became complacent and dependent on offloading the devastating environmental cost to a country often halfway around the world. They were happy to collaborate on research, but even happier to leave the real material risks to other countries. This left them reeling however when they were cut off from those supplies, and struggled to fight rising export prices, or restart decades old mining operations. It also led to many illicit Chinse mining operations, seeking to capitalize by going behind the government to undercut tarriffed prices.

Even know, rare earth exports have been the subject of many news headlines in the last 7 months as the Trump administrations tariffs leave the U.S. electronic goods market especially susceptible to retalitory tariffs, since they have very little options to turn to besides China for their materials. It is a stark reminder that government investment in science and technology research can have huge economic and political benefits to a country. It can also lead to equal amounts of pollution and destruction. It can both aide cross-border collabortion or it can stifle it, and really drove home to me that these technologies are not inherently good or bad, but they are also not neutral.