Recently, there has been renewed concerns about efforts by China to acquire mineral assets overseas, taking advantage of recent company devaluations and their own abundant capital reserves. This is not a new concern, having arisen when Chinese companies began to look overseas for investment opportunities, particularly in the oil market, about a decade ago.

And this dates from nineteenth-century nations seeking to monopolize the whaling industry, to the English government establishing British Petroleum in an effort to avoid reliance on those undependable Americans. (Even the US, fearful of ‘running out’ of oil in the 1920s, established the Naval Petroleum Reserve, which proved useless.)

But there is some fire for all the smoke.…