Having returned from a five-year posting as the New York Times Beijing bureau chief, Nicholas Kristof published an essay in a 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs entitled “The Rise of China.” In that essay, he argued that the rapid development of China would constitute “the most important trend in the world for the next century” (p. 59). During the 28 years since the end of the Cold War, Kristof’s claim about China has become conventional wisdom.
The phenomenon of China’s rise has spawned a voluminous literature in which efforts are made to divine China’s potential, power, and purpose in global relations. Sophia Kalantzakos’s China and the Geopolitics of Rare Earths is a recent contribution to such efforts.
Kalantzakos demonstrates considerable ambition. She asserts in Chapter 1 that China’s current monopolistic control of the global mining, refining, and distribution of rare earths is a harbinger of China’s growing power, purpose, and intent to alter extant global norms, institutions, and bargains at the core of the post–World War II liberal international order. One aim of the book is to leverage economic statecraft theory, in addition to the notions of resource scarcity, competition, and nationalism, to advance the claim that the case of rare earths reveals broader patterns of competition among powerful nation-states for control over strategic resources. Increasing resource scarcity, Kalantzakos argues, may contribute to increased competition and nationalism, cultivating conditions ripe for militarized disputes over strategic resource access and control. Another aim of the book is to develop economic statecraft theory and, thus, international relations theory. How and why, however, the author does not stipulate. In the end, she chides Western liberal democracies for neglecting to develop rare earth policies sufficient to reduce dependency on rare earths produced in China.
For those uninitiated in the political economy of rare earths, Chapter 2 provides a thorough overview of the critical importance of rare earths to global economic growth, security, and—especially—high-technology products, including communications devices, applications, and computing systems. This chapter is a strength of the book. The pervasiveness of rare earth utilization in the global political economy cannot be exaggerated. Any computer, Internet connected device, or system that relies on some degree of digital computation must have rare earths in order to function. The promise of the information economy is, in other words, wholly dependent on plentiful and accessible supplies of global rare earths. Raising the specter of rare earths scarcity serves as a new focal point for resource competition and nationalism among rare earths–consuming and producing economies.
Supporting the claim that strategic resource competition and nationalism are present in global rare earths markets, Chapter 3 reviews two additional cases in the form of salt and oil. The purpose of the chapter is to demonstrate how China has relied on economic statecraft during different historical periods, in order to remedy the problem of resource scarcity consistent with observations in global rare earth markets.
Drawing on these insights, Chapter 4 describes how China successfully monopolized the global rare earths market, consistent with its long use of economic statecraft. The author’s passion for the topic is palpable throughout the book, most especially in this chapter, and it is perhaps this passion that contributes to her rather fervent assessment of China’s economic statecraft as being a threat to Western liberal democracies and international order.
Such enthusiasm might have been tempered had an adequate engagement occurred with alternative views in the literature on China’s rare earths policy and economic statecraft. For example, Elizabeth C. Economy and Michael Levi’s By All Means Necessary (2014) argues that China’s effort to secure access to strategic resources is less threatening than advertised. Economy and Levi argue that China is adjusting how it conducts economic statecraft as it gains experience with the liberal international order. Given Kalantzakos’s understanding of the Chinese threat to the rare earths market, Chapter 5 concludes the book by advocating for Western liberal democracies to incorporate economic statecraft more directly into foreign policy to counter China. Kalantzekos' attention to the first aim of the book is not repaid in kind to the other aim of the book.
The book's second aim is an effort to leverage the rare earths case to further the development of international relations theory. Within foreign policy studies, economic statecraft theory has largely been brought to bear on describing, explaining, and theorizing the use of economic sanctions. David A. Baldwin’s seminal Economic Statecraft (1985) notes that economic statecraft is a component of foreign policy and includes a range of possible state actions within markets, undertaken to influence another actor to do what it otherwise would not do. Crucially, when employing economic statecraft, as Baldwin points out, it is useful to distinguish between the targets (or domain) of an influence attempt and the objectives (or scope) of the attempt (pp. 16–17). The fundamental logic of economic statecraft is explicit action intended to exert influence sufficient to alter the policy incentives of targeted actors.
Unfortunately, Kalantzakos’ book lacks a clear and concise explication of economic statecraft theory that describes its logic, scope, and purpose. The author describes statecraft as “essentially another way of describing the art of conducting state affairs” (p. 23). However, while claiming to rely on Baldwin in support of this definition, Kalantzakos actually employs a view of statecraft that Baldwin critically analyzes prior to offering his own concrete definition of the term, which he defines as “the instruments used by policymakers in their attempts to exercise power, i.e., to get others to do what they would not otherwise do” (Economic Statecraft, p. 9). Consequently, China and the Geopolitics of Rare Earths is not hewing directly to the theory it purports to further develop.
This problem leads the author to neglect an important causal feature of economic statecraft theory: influence. In subsequent chapters, Kalantzakos drops any reference to “influence” and, in so doing, neglects to specify and demonstrate the operational logic of strategic resources, such as rare earths, as an economic statecraft instrument. In short, why has China monopolized global rare earths? If it has done so in support of a broader grand strategy, what is that grand strategy and how do rare earths advance grand strategy objectives? What is the precise influence that China seeks to exert on target states through control of the global rare earths market? How does or will that targeted influence, arising from control of a strategic resource, provoke change in the actions taken by target states? Most importantly, how does China benefit from control of global rare earths markets and any influence gained and directed toward other states?
China and the Geopolitics of Rare Earths gestures toward answering these questions but falls short of doing so, leaving much to the imagination of the reader. This is due partly to conceptual fuzziness and partly to not heeding Baldwin’s counsel to clearly describe and explain influence targets and influence objectives. The conceptual ambiguity, inattention to operational logic specification, and inadequate attention to alternative views of China’s resource policy unfortunately complicate efforts to bolster support for the broader theoretical claims posited in the book.
This book does not achieve the full scope of its ambitions. The elements for delivering on its promise to economic statecraft theory are present—resource scarcity, competition, and nationalism, in addition to strategic resource control. But the author does not fully leverage economic statecraft theory in a fashion sufficient to explicate the connections and patterns necessary to substantiate its broader claims concerning international relations theory. The author, nonetheless, should be lauded for ambition, and for casting valuable light on an important research area that demands further attention.
