@TheSpoonyBard said:
Several articles (and the podcast) mentioned the plot revolves around the war between China and the US over rare earth elements. Which, it turns out, isn't really that rare.
Basically, it's not economically or environmentally viable to mine it anywhere else but China at the moment (since most electronics manufacturing goes on there anyway and it's not like the Chinese have a stellar environmental record), but, y'know, you gotta cram in some sort of plot.
Your research is correct about them not being rare, as well as the fact that mining them can be done in environmentally destructive ways. Though I still find it kind of fun that the game is drawing attention to rare earth elements (aka rare earth minerals), even if the idea of the U.S. and China entering a serious Cold War over them is a stretch (unless U.S.-China relations deteriorate over other factors as well, which isn't impossible).
Another big reason why China has its current near-monopoly over production of rare earth elements (REE) is that no other country has the production facilities to refine/chemically distill the REE ore. Plenty of countries (including the U.S.) have or will have active mines, but they still need to send the ore to China if they want to make use of the REE. One former U.S. Geological Survey expert on REE described the production process as basically involving tons of chemical vats and tanks to gradually extract the REE from whatever was mined. If the U.S. or any other country wants its own independent REE supply chain, it needs to build those separation facilities -- but they're not cheap and it'll likely take several years.
(I've written a number of articles about this as part of my day job in recent years -- here is a basic primer sample on REE.)
To be fair to the Black Ops 2 premise, there has been a fair amount of tension involving China's current leverage concerning REE. There are often accusations about China's government or state-owned companies manipulating the pricing and supply of REE, although China has countered that it's trying to impose better environmental regulations and shut down smaller, dirtier REE mining groups in the country. China also became annoyed enough with Japan and the West in separate incidents to temporarily suspend REE exports, but the main political tension in both cases (China-Japan territorial dispute and WTO investigation of China) was unrelated to REE.
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