India, Sept. 2 -- In May 2025, Ford stopped building the Explorer at its Chicago assembly plant for a week - not for want of chips, steel or workers, but for want of small rare-earth magnets used throughout the vehicle. They were stuck behind an exports-approval queue on the other side of the world.

Nobody had declared an embargo. Beijing had simply asked the world to fill in forms. Deng Xiaoping's widely cited 1992 remark - "The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths" - is usually read as a boast about geology. Three decades later, it looks more like an industrial-policy plan that worked.

Even though China holds less than half of the world's rare-earth reserves, its control grows much stronger at every stage of production. Accordin...