China doesn't play by the rules of international trade. Labor unions are illegal, workers are mistreated and underpaid and their companies run roughshod over any attempt at environmental protections. Naturally, their corrupt starvation-wages economy has allowed it to continue on as a low-cost provider, bankrupting the competition and closing factories all over the world. And now they're using that ill-gotten economic heft to buy up swathes of strategic resources as raw materials, bypassing what ought to be profitable processing operations on our end. Why do we let them do it?

Recommended reading: China has our forests. Now we're sending our oilfields, too