The EU executive will unveil next week measures to cut the bloc's over-reliance on China for critical raw materials as Europe seeks to keep up with fierce global competition from the U.S. and Asia…Despite years of warning signs that the old model of rules-based trade was coming to an end, accelerated by U.S. President Donald Trump's return to power, European governments have been asleep at the wheel, EU and industry officials said…"Europe’s vulnerabilities stem from having a growth model geared towards a world that is gradually disappearing."…Beijing's threat of new curbs on rare earth exports to the West in October, on top of restrictions announced in April, has caused fresh panic in European car, clean energy and semiconductor sectors all heavily dependent on them…The Economic Security Doctrine to be unveiled on Wednesday aims to make Europe's industry more self-sufficient and includes a plan for critical raw materials, called ResourceEU - mimicking the RePowerEU scheme of weaning itself off Russian oil and gas…Yet curbing the EU's dependence on Beijing will be harder than ending its reliance on Russian natural gas. The materials are not easily substitutable like gas, and China is by far the cheapest and dominates both extraction and processing know-how…The EU is looking to the European Investment Bank, owned by EU governments, for funding and to the EU's Global Gateway plan - its version of China's Belt and Road scheme - to invest in projects that would benefit third countries and the EU…Industry executives warn the EU could lose out to the U.S. and other Western allies like Japan, Canada and Australia who are throwing billions of dollars behind global supply diversification efforts…The U.S. set industry expectations after the Pentagon signed a rare earths deal guaranteeing a minimum price and the U.S. recently poached European supplies and knowledge…The Commission has also launched a pilot stockpile mechanism with some EU countries to jointly buy and store critical raw materials to get a better price and supply certainty…But there will be no decisions on where, how and which materials to keep in storage until a new critical minerals centre, inspired by Japan, is up and running next year.