Is China’s lithium quest fuelled by business or politics, and how far will it go to secure ‘white gold’?

• South America’s Lithium Triangle contains more than half of the world’s reserves of the critical metal that is used in batteries, and China is looking to carve out a bigger piece of the pie
• But the metal’s mining and refinery have been politicised amid rising geopolitical tensions with the West and an ongoing supply-chain crisis