Power Playbook: Beijing’s Bid to Secure Overseas Transition Minerals

Beijing is a major source of financing for projects around the globe that involve the specific minerals needed to facilitate a clean energy transition and achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Yet its financial commitments for these transition mineral operations are opaque and poorly-documented. This report is designed to help policymakers, journalists, and researchers understand how Beijing uses financial instruments to bankroll transition mineral operations in developing countries. It draws on a newly-developed dataset that systematically tracks China’s official sector financial commitments for copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium, and rare earth element extraction and processing operations across Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) participant countries over a twenty-two-year period. We separate fact from fiction to decode China’s “playbook” and document how Beijing leverages a massive stockpile of foreign exchange reserves to expand its control over key segments of the global supply chain for transition minerals.