At a sprawling industrial complex in the Inner Mongolian city of Baotou, workers feed bag after bag of rare-earth additives into roaring furnaces, turning ordinary steel into a high-performance alloy worth twice as much.
This is the front line of a technological leap being powered by China’s dominance in critical minerals and its strategic industrial policy.
The advanced rare-earth steel being produced is used in the country’s most ambitious engineering projects – from high-speed railways to…