Baoji

Most of the titanium in every Chinese spacecraft, submarine, and fighter jet was processed in a city of 3.3 million that few people outside Shaanxi have heard of. Baoji sits at the western edge of the Guanzhong Plain at 567 metres elevation, a crossroads city where northwest China meets the southwest. Its Wikipedia entry leads with Bronze Age archaeology and the birthplace of Zhou dynasty culture. What it undersells is that Baoji produces 65% of China's titanium and 33% of the global supply, making it the largest titanium industrial cluster on Earth.

The concentration is staggering. Over 600 titanium processing and trading enterprises operate in Baoji, anchored by Baoti Group — China's largest titanium company, which has set more than 110 industry standards covering over 90% of all titanium specifications in the country. Baoti maintains the most complete titanium production chain in the world and has fulfilled more than 8,000 national-level new material trial production tasks. From surgical implants to badminton rackets, from deep-sea submersibles to satellite components, the material traces back to this single cluster in Shaanxi.

The city's GDP reached ¥227.7 billion ($31.5 billion) by 2020, and the titanium and new materials cluster has since been designated a national strategic emerging industry. But Baoji's dominance carries the same structural risk as any keystone concentration: when a 2022 supply chain disruption temporarily constrained titanium sponge output, aerospace manufacturers across China felt the delay within weeks. One city's production hiccup becomes an industry-wide tremor.

The biological parallel is the nautilus. The nautilus builds its shell from aragonite — a material far lighter and stronger than its chemical composition would predict — and has survived essentially unchanged for 500 million years because nothing else builds the structure as efficiently. Baoji has become the nautilus of the global titanium supply chain: the organism that builds the structural material everyone else depends on. The shell is elegant and resilient, but there is only one animal making it, and the geometry cannot be replicated quickly elsewhere.