Post #2820815

@samueljohnson@mstdn.social @solar_chase@mastodon.green As a reminder, communist China has illegally occupied Tibet, murdered and starved to death millions of people during Cultural Revolution, right now it’s pursuing violent prosecution of Uyghurs and makes heavy use of forced labour. It also enforces strict censorship and many other attributes of a totalitarian state. If you control 80% of market, you’re not “throwing a lifeline”, you’re a practical monopoly. And monopolies always do what monopolies do, that is abuse their monopolist situation, which is what China just started doing on rare earth metals market: https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-new-rare-earth-and-magnet-restrictions-threaten-us-defense-supply-chains In case of EU, it’s also about fundamental values - if we say our socio-economic model is the best and our environmental laws should be copied by everyone, then we should put the money where our mouth is and prove it in practice. That is, run mining and industrial operations inside EU at low environmental footprint rather than import everything from a totalitarian state “because cheap”. The current policy just ridicules what we say.