1.  The following are excerpts from Michael Martina's July 15, 2021 news report headlined "U.S. Senate passes bill to ban all products from China's Xinjiang".

(Begin excerpts)
WASHINGTON, July 14 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate passed legislation on Wednesday to ban the import of products from China's Xinjiang region....

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act would create a "rebuttable presumption" assuming goods manufactured in Xinjiang are made with forced labor and therefore banned under the 1930 Tariff Act, unless otherwise certified by U.S. authorities.

Passed by unanimous consent, the bipartisan measure would shift the burden of proof to importers. The current rule bans goods if there is reasonable evidence of forced labor.

The bill must also pass the House of Representatives before it can be sent to the White House for President Joe Biden to sign into law. It was not immediately clear when that might take place.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who introduced the legislation with Democrat Jeff Merkley, called on the House to act quickly.

"We will not turn a blind eye to the CCP's ongoing crimes against humanity, and we will not allow corporations a free pass to profit from those horrific abuses," Rubio said in a statement.

"No American corporation should profit from these abuses. No American consumers should be inadvertently purchasing products from slave labor," Merkley said.

Democratic and Republican aides said they expected the measure would get strong support in the House, noting the House approved a similar measure nearly unanimously last year....  (End excerpts)

Source:  reutersdotcom

2.  .... Rare-earth mining is notorious for the environmental hazards it poses and while the challenges of cleaning up the environment are steep.... 

The pollution resulting from rare-earth mining has created soil incapable of supporting crops and water supplies have been contaminated. 

Chinese officials have attempted to counteract these threats by shutting down a large number of mines, especially the smaller and the illegal ones, but there are still severe, large-scale threats that remain unresolved.

From north near the Mongolian border to south in Guangdong, China is struggling to clean-up the environment polluted by mining and some claim they are making things worse. The clean-up process is expensive and time-consuming, and some say it could be 50-100 years for the environment to recover.

A 2019 US Army report highlights a central issue driving rare-earth pollution in China: “China is less burdened with environmental or labor regulatory requirements that can greatly increase costs incurred in mining and manufacturing rare-earth products.”

In the meantime, the pollution from existing mines threatens not just the areas in which the mines are located, but major cities that are downstream like Ganzhou with a population of over 8 million people....

Source:  earthdotorg

3.  When someone turns you into a punching bag, you have several options to react to his attack:

(a)  Run away.

(b)  Stand there smiling sheepishly and let the attacker continue his punching

(c)  Counterstrike.

The last is obviously the best option for anyone with common sense.  In actuality, there are many ways for China to hit back at the US.  It is just a matter of national dignity and sheer will power for a country to defend itself against any devastating attack.

As seen in the above second article, rare-earth mining has devastated China’s environment.  Hence it is killing two birds with one stone for China to start closing almost all its rare earth mines but a keep a few in Xinjiang for domestic consumption.

In other words, it's high time for China to start restricting rare-earth exports to the US.  To put Uncle Sam in a bit of a dilemma, only rare metals from Xinjiang are allowed to be exported to the US.  If the US is willing to swallow the bitter pill quietly, China can choose to ban all exports of rare earth metals to that country eventually.