On the Chinese front of his trade offensive, Donald Trump, from his first term onwards, has combined tariffs on imports from China with US export controls aimed at Beijing's technological containment, such as the ban on supplying the latest generation of software and chips to telecommunications giant Huawei. Democratic President Toe Biden confirmed many of these measures in the ambiguous formula of a "small vard with a high fence": severe restrictions but limited to technologies deemed sensitive for national security.
Underground panic
The Chinese government has responded blow for blow, both with trade tariffs on US goods and by rationing export licences for strategic raw materials. In this way, it has been said, the trade battle has extended into manufacturing supply chains, opening a technological cold war
with new forms of deterrence. In 2023, for example, pressure from the White House succeeded in blocking sales in China by the Dutch group ASML, one of the world's leading manufacturers of machinery for the production of the most advanced chips. Beijing responded by reducing exports of certain elements essential to the sector, such as gallium, germanium, and graphite.
In April, when Trump relaunched the tariff war on Liberation Day
, China reacted not only with decisive counter-tariffs, but also by tightening export controls, extending them to rare earths and related magnets – crucial in a variety of industrial sectors. The leverage of these metals – in which China plays a dominant role in global production – has been considered, alongside market signals on US federal debt, to be among the factors that forced Trump to adopt a more conciliatory stance towards Beijing.
At the end of June, Bertille Bayart commented in Le Figaro: It is difficult to appreciate the shockwave that has swept through the global economy in recent months as a result of this quasi-embargo. Public authorities, for political and negotiating reasons, and companies, for competitive reasons, have preferred to downplay its impact. But beneath the surface, there has been panic on board
.
Imitating the enemy
On October 10th, the Chinese government announced a further extension of controls on rare earths and other strategic exports from December, accusing Washington of violating the summer truce with new restrictions, such as tariffs on Chinese ships in American ports. Trump reacted with his usual verbal excesses, threatening to raise tariffs back into triple digits, but three weeks later he accepted yet another truce, sealed by a meeting with President Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, on October 30th. Among the known terms of the compromise are a 10% reduction in US tariffs on Chinese exports, a resumption of Chinese imports of American soybeans, and, above all, a one-year pause on the port tariffs and export restrictions announced in recent months by both sides.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tells the Financial Times that China has made a serious mistake by showing the world that it is willing to use rare metals as a political weapon. Beijing replies that control mechanisms on exports of goods with dual use
, civil and military, are a widespread and legitimate international practice. In a commentary by the CSIS strategic studies centre in Washington, William Reinsch admits that China is doing with rare earths exactly what Washington did with chips: The United States is getting a taste of its own medicine
. Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, reminds The New York Times of the precedent set up by the US and its allies
against Huawei: If you want to say this is coercive, fine, you know, we just learned from you
.
Another precedent
During Trump's first term, the Chinese press cited the squeeze on rare earths as one of the nuclear weapons
of economic warfare, along with the threat of selling off US Treasury reserves. It is a sign of the times that, in recent years, Beijing has chosen to fire a few warning shots with its artillery of strategic metals, but this is not unprecedented.
In 2010, at the height of the longstanding Sino-Japanese dispute over the Senkaku-Diaoyu islands, Beijing hit Tokyo with a de facto embargo on rare earths. The ominous signal was picked up by all the major powers and led to a long legal battle at the World Trade Organisation. The US, EU, and Japan challenged China's export controls on rare earths as a form of unfair competition. China's defence focused on its right to mitigate the heavy pollution and health risks associated with the extraction and refining of these metals. In 2014, the WTO tribunal rejected Beijing's arguments and, despite protesting a violation of its socio-environmental sovereignty, China complied with the ruling.
For years, this episode was cited as an example of the effectiveness of the WTO's judicial power and China's willingness to comply with multilateral rules. A decade later, much has changed. Amidst assaults, retreats, and fleeting truces, the tariff war between the US and China has continued since 2018 and appears to be gradually intensifying. China's rare-earth metals deterrent is a key issue in bilateral negotiations between Washington and Beijing. At this point, the WTO referee is no longer in the game.
Mining rearmament
As always, clashes and agreements between the US and China affect the EU, which is preparing countermeasures. In 2024, the European Council approved a new regulation that aims, by 2030, to increase its own production and refining, and diversify international suppliers of 34 critical raw materials
. Of these, seventeen are defined as strategic
, including copper, aluminium, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and, indeed, the elements wielded by China in today's trade battle, such as gallium, germanium, graphite, and rare earths.
Ursula von der Leyen addressed the issue in Berlin on October 25th: In recent weeks and months China has dramatically tightened export controls over rare earths and battery materials. [...] if you consider that over 90% of our consumption of rare-earth magnets come from imports from China, you see the risks here for Europe and its most strategic industrial sectors, from automotive to industrial motors, defence to aerospace, or AI chips to data centres
.
In addition to calling for a complete change of gear on military spending and investment
, the Commission president announced a new RESourceEU plan
, with various measures: recycling valuable elements from end-of-life products; investing in production and refining capacity in the EU; finding alternative mineral sources in countries such as Ukraine, Australia, Canada, and Chile; and coordinating purchases and stocks at the EU level. Von der Leyen insists on the need not to repeat with China the mistake made with Russia: We learned this lesson painfully with energy; we will not repeat it with critical materials
. She added that European rearmament must also include raw materials, because the global economy is completely different than what it was even a few years ago [...]; today's world is unforgiving
.
Vitamins and pistons
In the Earth's crust, abundant metals such as iron, copper, zinc, aluminium, and lead are mixed with around 30 metals with special properties, which are rarer and more difficult to refine, and therefore much more expensive. The French specialist yearbook Cyclope [Economica, 2024] uses the definition minor metals
, referring both to low production volumes and to the particular qualities that mean generally only tiny quantities are required: Functioning as 'vitamins' within numerous technologies, they are indispensable and greatly improve performance
.
Cyclope divides minor metals
into: 1) semiconductor elementals (e.g., silicon, gallium, and germanium), essential for modern electronics and photovoltaics; 2) refractory metals (such as niobium, molybdenum, and tungsten), with very high melting points and resistance, used in superalloys for aircraft jet engines and gas turbines; 3) rare earths (such as yttrium, scandium, and the fifteen lanthanides), with special optical and magnetic properties.
Among the numerous rare earths, 90% of the market value is concentrated in four magnetic
elements: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. By participating in the transformation of energy into motion, writes Guillaume Pitron in The War for Rare Metals [2018], magnets are now – to a vast majority of electric engines – what pistons have been to steam and internal-combustion engines. Magnets have made it possible to manufacture billions of engines, both big and small, capable of executing certain repetitive movements in our stead
. From locomotives to electric toothbrushes, from lifts to mobile phones, our societies have become completely magnetised. To say that the world would be significantly slower without magnets containing rare-earth metals is not an understatement
.
Weapon of interdependence
In the French writer Pitron's framework, the 19th century was the age of the steam engine, coal, and the British Empire; the 20th century was that of the internal-combustion engine, oil, and American dominance; the 21st century will be marked by renewable energy, electric cars, and artificial intelligence – and therefore by rare metals and Chinese hegemony. In Western reporting on critical raw materials, the term panic
often recurs; one reads that, in this mining sector, China has secured a role similar to that of the OPEC cartel in the global oil market. In Le Figaro at the end of October, Bayart went so far as to say that, given China's ability to exert global pressure, rare earths are to them what the dollar is to the United States
. This is an exaggeration, but the essential point remains: The weapon of the economic confrontation between the two superpowers of the 21st century
is precisely those interdependencies, once considered in the euphoria of globalisation as a factor of pacification
.
According to an alarmed editorial in the Financial Times, global leaders have been asleep at the wheel as their economies have become dependent on China's low-cost rare earths
. The voice of the City calls for a coordinated response from the old G7 powers, involving massive State investment, given that developing autonomous production and alternative supplies will take years or decades: China's near-global monopoly in rare earths will not be usurped soon
. This is the beginning of a global battle that will intertwine with the crisis in the world order in unpredictable ways and proportions.
Lotta Comunista, November 2025