On September 24th, during the meeting between the heads of state of China and the US dollar, what is truly worth keeping an eye on may be a very small piece of metal ❗ ️ Tomorrow, the heads of state of China and the United States will meet in Washington. Many people are staring at tariffs AI、 Agricultural products, Boeing. But I suggest focusing on something that doesn't look ordinary: rare earths. Why? Because it may be the most special card in this negotiation. Rare earths themselves are not scarce. What is truly scarce is the complete industry chain of mining, separation, refining, processing, and turning it into high-performance magnets. And China has a very high global share in this chain. Reuters cited industry data: China accounts for about 70% of global rare earth mining, 85% of refining capacity, and about 90% of rare earth metal alloy and magnet production. That's quite interesting. Rare earths are not only connected to a few mining companies as they move downwards: New energy vehicles → robots → aerospace → electronic devices → AI hardware → defense industry An inconspicuous piece of metal connects the entire high-end manufacturing system in the end. More noteworthy is that rare earths have become one of the core topics of discussion between the two sides in the pre visit economic and trade negotiations between China and the United States. The Ministry of Commerce has previously stated that both parties will jointly study and address each other's reasonable and legitimate concerns regarding the supply chain of key minerals such as rare earths. So for tomorrow's meeting, the variable I most want to observe is: Will there be any new institutional arrangements for rare earth export controls? If it occurs, the impact may extend far beyond the rare earth industry. The ones that are truly being re priced may be the global new energy+robots+AI hardware+high-end manufacturing supply chain. But many people would say, "Rare earths are China's trump card This statement is too simple. What is truly worth studying is the value of rare earths, not underground, but in the industrial chain. The United States can certainly develop its own rare earth resources and has been promoting supply chain diversification. The problem is that there is a very long industrial chain and technological link between mining and the final high-performance magnet. So what China and the United States are actually competing for is not "a rare earth mine", but who has the complete system to transform resources into industrial capabilities. Resources are becoming the pricing power of the industrial chain. In the past few years, the first reaction to the competition between China and the United States in technology has been chips. But if we look at the entire industry chain as a whole: Chips require equipment and materials → AI requires computing power → computing power requires servers → servers require high-speed optical communication → new energy vehicles require motors → robots require high-performance motors and actuators → many high-performance magnetic materials in these links are related to the rare earth industry chain. Chips are the most highly regarded "hard assets" in the AI era, while rare earths may be the easily overlooked "underlying resources" behind global high-end manufacturing. Tomorrow's meeting, the market may focus on a sentence, an agreement, or a tariff. But what is truly worth long-term observation is whether there will be new rules in the rare earth industry chain. Because once the rules change, the impact is not on the price of a single metal, but on the cost, supply chain, and industrial layout of global high-end manufacturing.