>>514062898
Sometimes they do exist, sometimes they do not exist.

For some rare earths there is mining going outside of Chinese, for other rare earths there's not. But for almost all of them, only China has the technical knowledge and capacity to refine, and this is the real bottleneck.

>>514063095
I know they do have, but much of North Korean economy is directly managed by the state to deal with defense needs, this "drains" a lot of resources that would otherwise go for the private sector.