Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), the late great Chinese leader, was a man of aphorisms. “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or yellow, as long as it catches mice,” he said in 1962, capturing the pragmatic spirit that would later fuel China’s economic rise.
It should come as no surprise, then, that in the latest round of trade hostilities between China and the U.S., commentators are once again leaning on a Deng quip to make sense of it all. “The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths,” Deng is reported to have said, decades ago.
Looking back, didn’t he exactly predict how things would play out? Aren’t the OPEC oil embargoes of the 1970s the perfect corollary for what we see today? China correspondents seem to think so. Indeed, it’s hard to spend 10 minutes reading about China’s escalating program of rare earth export controls without encountering the famous Deng couplet. There’s just one problem, says Julie Klinger, a professor of geography at the University of Delaware: That’s not what Deng meant.
Today, an industrial park in the Inner Mongolian city of Baotou commemorating the region’s industrial rise displays stones with Deng’s saying carved in calligraphy (中東有石油，中國有稀土). Deng popularized the saying during a stop on his “Southern Tour” in 1992, when he traveled across the country in the wake of global outrage over the Tiananmen Square Massacre to revive faith in his economic reform program.
The timing of Deng’s remark is important, because in January 1992 (not 1987, as some sources suggest), the oil-related crisis in the Middle East on the top of everyone’s mind was not the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. It was Iraq’s resounding defeat in the Gulf War. About a decade ago, Klinger decided to dig into newspapers and policy documents from the early 1990s to see what the Chinese were saying about Middle Eastern oil at the time.
“The way that it was explained or interpreted in the Chinese context was that Middle Eastern oil has provided the impetus for Western imperial intervention in the Middle East for a long time. And China needs to be aware of this,” Klinger says.
The Deng saying first appeared in The New York Times in August 2009, as China started to place limits on the production and export of rare earths. “As the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries has done with oil, China is now starting to flex its muscle,” Kieth Bradsher wrote.
In the fall of 2010, a boat collision near the disputed Senkaku Islands prompted China to cut off shipments of rare earths to Japan for two months. (Whether the disruptions came at Beijing’s behest has been debated for years, but that’s a different story.) Less than a decade removed from China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, much of the Western world was appalled to see China weaponizing its control over an industry essential to the increasingly globalized economy. Before long, the Deng quote was everywhere.
Klinger is adamant that Deng did not hatch a decades-long plan to dominate the rare earth industry and hang it over America’s head. “The quote was widely circulated in domestic and international discourse in the years following 2010, as though the crisis represented some intended endpoint of long-term Chinese strategy,” she writes in her 2017 book “Rare Earth Frontiers.” “Such assertions are ahistorical.”
Over the past year, as the U.S.-China trade war has escalated, then calmed, then escalated again — with China’s rare earths playing a starring role — Deng’s quote has experienced another renaissance. But the meaning has changed. It’s no longer about OPEC or the Middle East. It’s about how long ago he said it. “This quote functions as a Rorschach test,” Klinger says. “What it is represented as meaning — and in which printed source — is more revelatory about a given set of geopolitical anxieties of the moment.”
Many Americans fear that for decades, while each U.S. president did his best to unravel the work of his predecessor, China was playing the long game. Plotting and scheming with each successive five-year plan to overtake them. And what better way to express that fear than with a quote from the great oracle of Chinese economic development, literally carved in stone, seeming to declare that one day, rare earths would come back to bite the U.S.
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