US “minerals mafia” report reveals the battle with China for the next industrial era

When a tailings dam collapsed at a Chinese-owned copper mine in Zambia last year, tens of millions of litres of toxic waste spilled into waterways feeding the Kafue River, the country’s most important waterway. Fish died, farmland was burned by acidic sludge, and hundreds of thousands of people temporarily lost access to clean water.

The environmental catastrophe was bad enough. It’s what followed that gives a report from the US House of Representatives Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party broader significance.

According to the report, the Chinese state company operating the mine sought to suppress environmental findings, intimidate civil society groups, avoid paying compensation, and silence media reporting on the scale of the contamination.

The report, called China’s Minerals Mafia, is an overtly political part of Washington’s widening confrontation with Beijing.

Yet beneath the rhetoric sits a more important argument: China’s dominance in critical minerals is not simply the result of scale and industrial policy. It is the result of a willingness to operate in places, and under conditions, that Western firms increasingly avoid.

The stakes are higher than just the commodities. Lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper and rare earths underpin the technologies shaping the next industrial era – electric vehicles, battery storage, semiconductors, AI infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, energy transition technologies, and defence systems. That struggle is the defining geopolitical contest of the coming decades.

Washington’s argument is that China has spent years quietly locking in control over the upstream end of this future economy. Not just by buying mines all over the world, but by building influence across entire supply chains: extraction, transport, processing, refining. The report describes a recurring pattern across parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America: weak governance, opaque contracts, environmental degradation, labour abuses, and producer countries exporting raw minerals while China captures the industrial value further downstream.

Zimbabwe’s lithium industry is presented as a cautionary example. Chinese companies control 90% of the country’s mining sector, and dominate the lithium sector following a wave of acquisitions and investment tied to surging global demand for battery minerals. The report cites allegations of smuggling, under-reporting, labour abuses, and environmental damage. More importantly, and typically, it argues that Zimbabwe risks remaining trapped as a supplier of raw ore while processing and higher-value manufacturing take place elsewhere.

A similar dynamic is reported for the Democratic Republic of Congo, where China dominates production of cobalt, another mineral critical to battery production.

In Indonesia, China is deeply embedded in nickel processing. In Papua New Guinea, Serbia, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Afghanistan, Burma, and Namibia, the report alleges Chinese firms benefit from lax oversight, official corruption, lack of competition, and absence of standards in pursuit of strategic mineral access.

None of this means Western mining companies are innocent actors. The extractive industries have a long history of environmental destruction, corruption, exploitation, and violence, including American, British and Australian firms. The report briefly acknowledges that background before moving on.

The uncomfortable point underneath the politics is harder to dismiss. China has accepted political, reputational and operational risks that most Western firms increasingly cannot. Environmental, social and governance standards, shareholder scrutiny and legal exposure constrain how Western companies operate abroad.

Beijing’s state-backed miners often function according to a different set of incentives. Unfortunately, that has produced a formidable advantage. For countries desperate for investment, Chinese capital arrives fast – often tied to infrastructure promises such as the Belt and Road Initiative – and with fewer political conditions.

But the longer-term results can be uneven. Resource-rich states repeatedly find themselves exporting unprocessed minerals while importing dependency. The wealth leaves, and any leverage often goes with it.

This has led to the deeper anxiety that has emerged in Washington and other Western capitals. The concern is not simply access to critical minerals but the dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains at nearly every stage of the industrial process.

That concern extends well beyond mining. Control over refining and processing has become just as important as control over extraction.

China already dominates much of the world’s lithium processing and rare earth refining capacity. This gives it influence over supply, pricing and industrial resilience.

The report’s most revealing feature is not its provocative title. It is the language of strategic competition that runs through it. Critical minerals are increasingly being treated as geopolitical terrain.

China understood this many years ago. Western governments are finally catching up, with the challenge now to build a competing model that offers producer countries something more sustainable than a new scramble for resources dressed in the language of strategic necessity.

Producer countries need functioning industries, environmental standards, fair returns and livelihoods that allow people to share in the wealth beneath their own soil rather than watching it sail away.