私はそう信じていますBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Last month /a Chinese trawler operating in Japanese-controlled waters /collided with two vessels of Japan’s Coast Guard. Japan detained/ the trawler’s captain; China responded/ by cutting off Japan’s access to crucial raw materials.
collide with・・・：・・・と衝突する（自動詞ＶＩ）
detaine：拘留する cut off:遮断する
主語の前で区切りをいれます、Last monthは副詞句（Ｍ）です。
第一文は、ＭＳＶＭ、第二文はＳＶＯ 第三文はＳＶＭになります。
先月、日本領海内で操業中の中国漁船が２隻の海上保安庁の船に衝突した。日本が漁船の船長を拘留し、中国は日本のレアアースの入手を遮断することで応酬した。
And /there was nowhere else/ to turn: China accounts for /97 percent of the world’s supply of rare earths,（ minerals that play an essential role/ in many high-technology products, including military equipment）. Sure enough, Japan soon let the captain go.
account for ・・・、・・・を占める turn：そらす、かわす
nowhere else/ to turn 名詞句
to turn は前の名詞を修飾する不定詞）形容詞的用法
（名詞句）体言止め、です。前のレアアースの説明
そうなると、他にかわす処がなかった、中国は世界のレアアース（軍需製品を含む多くのハイテク製品で重要な役割を果たす鉱物資源）の供給の97%を占めている。案の定、日本はすぐ船長を釈放した。
I don’t know about you, but I find this story deeply disturbing, both for what it says about China and what it says about us. On one side, the affair highlights the fecklessness of U.S. policy makers, who did nothing while an unreliable regime acquired a stranglehold on key materials. On the other side, the incident shows a Chinese government that is dangerously trigger-happy, willing to wage economic warfare on the slightest provocation.
Some background: The rare earths are elements whose unique properties play a crucial role in applications ranging from hybrid motors to fiber optics. Until the mid-1980s the United States dominated production, but then China moved in.
“There is oil in the Middle East; there is rare earth in China,” declared Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s economic transformation, in 1992. Indeed, China has about a third of the world’s rare earth deposits. This relative abundance, combined with low extraction and processing costs — reflecting both low wages and weak environmental standards — allowed China’s producers to undercut the U.S. industry.
You really have to wonder why nobody raised an alarm while this was happening, if only on national security grounds. But policy makers simply stood by as the U.S. rare earth industry shut down. In at least one case, in 2003 — a time when, if you believed the Bush administration, considerations of national security governed every aspect of U.S. policy — the Chinese literally packed up all the equipment in a U.S. production facility and shipped it to China.
レアアース関連のブルームバーグの記事です。
http://www.bloomberg.co.jp/apps/news?pid=90900001&sid=a4gcQRXoJQfQ
ではよい一日を
