Rare earth has pulled scores of journalists and seekers into China. These minerals are key elements not just for clouds and drones, but for stories. The BBC's economics correspondent Paul Mason took a stab at the story after stumbling across rare earth while traveling in Chinajust after the Olympics in 2009. But his book is a novel. Almost everybody we meet in this novel is a fictionalized and hyper realistic version of people I have actually met in China."