China Begins Ban of Rare Earth Minerals to the US
The move comes a day after the Biden administration expanded curbs on the sale of advanced American technology to China.
Legal Insurrection readers may recall my previous report on the Biden administration warning Beijing of its plans to update rules that curb shipments of AI chips and chipmaking tools to China.
Now, a day after Team Biden tightened Chinese access to advanced American technology, Chinese officials have ordered a halt to exporting several rare minerals to this country.
The ban signals Beijing’s willingness to engage in supply chain warfare by blocking the export of important components used to make valuable products, like weaponry and semiconductors.
Sales of gallium, germanium, antimony and so-called superhard materials to the United States would be halted immediately on the grounds that they have dual military and civilian uses, China’s Ministry of Commerce said. The export of graphite would also be subject to stricter review.
China is central to many global supply chains, but it generally refrained from clamping down on its own exports during the first Trump administration, preferring instead to take more limited actions like buying soybeans from Brazil instead of the United States. But senior Chinese officials are worried that President-elect Donald J. Trump plans more stringent policies during his coming term in office.
As Legal Insurrection readers know from my previous post, these minerals are key components of technologies and equipment we use regularly. China has already begun curbing exports through regulations and restrictions in the past few years.
China said in July 2023 it would require exporters to apply for licenses to send to the U.S. the strategically important materials such as gallium and germanium. In August, the Chinese Commerce Ministry said it would restrict exports of antimony, which is used in a wide range of products from batteries to weapons, and impose tighter controls on exports of graphite.
Such minerals are considered critical for national security. China is a major producer of antimony, which is used in flame retardants, batteries, night-vision goggles and nuclear weapon production, according to a 2021 U.S. International Trade Commission report.
The limits announced by Beijing on Tuesday also include exports of super-hard materials, such as diamonds and other synthetic materials that are not compressible and extremely dense. They are used in many industrial areas such as cutting tools, disc brakes and protective coatings. The licensing requirements that China announced in August also covered smelting and separation technology and machinery and other items related to such super-hard materials.
China is the biggest global source of gallium and germanium, which are produced in small amounts but are needed to make computer chips for mobile phones, cars and other products, as well as solar panels and military technology.
China is a major global source of these materials, accounting for:
- 98.8% of refined gallium production
- 59.2% of refined germanium output
- 48% of globally mined antimony
Of course, it would be on-brand for Team Biden to heat up a war just before President-Elect Donald Trump returns to office, albeit a trade one.
China issued the new ban just two days after the U.S. curbed exports to 140 companies in China’s semiconductor industry. The U.S. crackdown — the third in three years — was aimed at stymieing China’s ability to advance artificial intelligence technologies for military applications.
The escalating tit-for-tat economic measures by Washington and Beijing come weeks before the swearing in of President-elect Donald Trump for his second term. During his first term, Trump launched a trade war with China, and he’s threatened to escalate the standoff once again with a new 10% blanket tariff on all Chinese imports once he returns to office.
“It comes as no surprise that China has responded to the increasing restrictions by American authorities, current and imminent, with its own restrictions on the supply of these strategic minerals,” Peter Arkell, chairman of the Global Mining Association of China, told Reuters. “It’s a trade war that has no winners.”
I am consoled by two facts:
1) Over 2 Billion Metric Tons of Rare Earth Minerals Discovered in Wyoming.
2) Native American racialist and eco-activist Deb Haaland will no longer be in charge of the Department of the Interior starting January 2025. Therefore, Americans will have access to their own supply of rare earth minerals.
Who knows? Trump may be able to sweeten the deal and get Denmark to sell us Greenland, which would alleviate our need for China even father.
Why Trump really should buy Greenland pic.twitter.com/iYC3vOr1pa
— Karli Bonne’ 🇺🇸 (@KarluskaP) November 26, 2024
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Comments
Well, the United States walked right into this one with its eyes wide open. Too bad there isn’t much, if anything, the Biden regime or even the Trump Administration can do if the CCP doesn’t allow the export of rare earth minerals to the United States.
Yes we can do something, we should have done so long ago. In the end this will hurt China far more than us. In fact, the best way to reign China in is source as much as we can internally and from actual allies. That brings me to the UN, which is a den of anti American low life.
We can develop sources here in defiance of the never mine anything ever people.
We can work with other places with better governments to do the same.
Stop relying on one of our primary opponents for things we need.
The problem is that a new mine can take something like ten years to develop so it looks like we may not be in a good position.
Cut the red tape and just get the f88k on with it so we (everyone not China) aren’t susceptible to blackmailing by China or anyone else that isn’t friendly to the west with resources we’ve made ourselves dependent on!
The longest journey starts with a single step. It’s time someone started.
>>We can develop sources here in defiance of the never mine anything ever people.<<
Yeah, good luck with that. If the Trump administration attempts to allow mining anywhere in the United States, especially those areas designated as protected areas, the Greens will tie the whole thing up in court for years with their legal maneuvering and nothing will be accomplished.
I think impoverishing some noisome commie obstructionists is a better use of bottomless taxpayer money than anything Brandon spent it on, how about you?
It’s about time Republicans took advantage of being “in power” rather than just being “in office.”
Those so-called rare Earths aren’t really that rare. They’re just time-consuming and expensive to produce and that’s why we don’t generally do it here. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have the capability which we might just have to recreate.
So is it mining or processing that’s the bottleneck?
There’s lots that can be done like exploiting your own natural resources AND not mandating ridiculous vehicles and forms of energy that requires these rare earth minerals!
Yeah, Br’er Xi throwed Br’er Trump right inter dat briar patch.
Now he’ll “have no choice” other than to drill, baby, drill for them minerals, which it turns out we have s*-tons of, “preserved” under “ecological and cultural land stewardship” or some such malarkey.
It’s not so much a question of having the minerals. It’s a question of pushing aside the environmentalist swill that will prevent our extracting them, and the even more violent opposition to developing the industrial infrastructure to refine the extracted material into its component metals.
How about expediting ALL permits, & remove all bureaucratic obstacles if someone wants to invest a billion or more dollars in the U.S.? What a boon to the economy that would be!!
If we can’t buy Greenland, we can at least work a trade deal with them.
By the way, there are ways around China’s “ban” like buying from a country that buys from China.
The unsolved issue is processing the rare earth minerals; apparently a toxic business. Last year, the U.S. exported 40,000 tons of rare earth mineral concentrate, 98% went to China for processing.
We can still do a preemptive nuclear strike against China which they would be helpless to respond to with even a day’s notice. Let’s do it.
Mate, go back to your village. They are missing their idiot.
We can recycle the batteries in EVs, since we won’t be driving them anyway.
Funny, I am expecting EV prices to plunge to the point I can buy them for their batteries.
Damn, there goes our Independence Day weenie roasts.
Let’s not forget the rare earth element Neodymium, which is used to make high strength magnets. Electric vehicles and wind turbines are voracious consumers of Neodymium. Glasses doped with Neodymium are used in lasers. China is the primary supplier. No Neodymium, no electric cars, wind energy. Also used in disk drives, microphones. The whole green energy paradigm depends on a supply of Neodymium. So one would think we should stockpile this and other rare earths. Years ago I looked into this. We didn’t. Ultimately we will be forced to open our own rare earth mines, and deal with the very toxic pollution. The pols in California don’t want the pollution, but do want EVs.
If one points out the contradictions you get the blank stare implying you’re not team player.
Before we play hard ball with China, we should have alternate sources lined up.
Speaking of supply chains, China supplies the USA with 90% of all its antibiotics. This sounds like a terrible vulnerabity to me.
Or worse, China is heavily invested in gain of function research. Just wait till China has an ‘accidental’ lab leak of some frankenstien bat virus that will cripple the world’s economy.
Oh, wait…
It will be harder for them to do that without Fauci to pay them to do it.
Maybe the uniparty that lined their pockets off the sale of these mineral to the CHICOMs can fix it. Just kidding they only care about power
Heck, if Biden had been re-elected Hunter would be the head of all the mining operations in China.
But what good would that do anybody except the Bidens?
“The sale of these mineral to the CHICOMs”?! Who exactly do you think sold them minerals that are in the ground, in China?!
The description of Deb Haaland as an “Eco-activist” cracks me up. Deb is dumb as a fence post. She has no positions of her own, she just parrots what other democrats tell her to say. She was chosen by Biden for the same reason KJP was chosen. She ticks the right boxes and is obedient.
Really, any Swedish adolescent on the spectrum can do her job.
Biden helped to set this whole thing up by first putting in place like that Indian broad who is shutting down all mining and drilling on public lands under Biden’s direction then attempting to “transition to clean energy” which requires large amounts of those minerals which makes the US and it’s proposed energy grid totally dependent on China. We could mine all the rare earth, uranium ( remember Hillary’s sale of Uranium to Chinese companies?) and other products.
Alas, Biden is merely continuing the policies of his predecessors: the consolidation of the market that made China the kingpin of these materials took awhile to occur, and it will take a long time (perhaps longer than we have) to unwind it. Our laws prohibit the use of the existing technologies to extract these materials (too “dirty”), our environmental lobby is powerful and well-funded and will tie any attempt to change the laws (and the development of an extractive business) in legal knots–it won’t be hard for the enviros to locate a sympathetic judge to block the process, and enough Americans hold magical views of how the world works that it will be politically difficult to make America a large-scale producer again.
Unburdening ourselves from what has been, namely an EPA-mandated mountain of paperwork, permits and red tape that add billions to cost and years to completion in extractive industries, would allow us to secure our own supply lines for critical substances and unhook the Chinese yoke from our country’s neck.
We can mine, process and build anything as long as there’s enviro-Leninist motivation to do so..
Nuclear power generation was off the table until Silicon Valley oligarchs require it to power AI server farms.
Heavy industry was off the table until Gavin Newsom decided to create his EV Utopia. (Salton Sea lithium extraction).
Building massive solar farms on congressionally set-aside “environmentally sensitive” wilderness regions like the Mojave desert. (Diane Feinstein, RFKJr., etc.)
“Further” or “farther” (strictly speaking, “farther” is reserved for physical, rather than temporal, distance, so “further” is probably the preferred word here), but certainly not “father.”
Wait until the Communist Chinese stop selling drug API to the west. They manufacture the majority of such materiel for all generic drugs.
“Of course, it would be on-brand for Team Biden to heat up a war just before President-Elect Donald Trump returns to office, albeit a trade one.”
Joey Bananas is throwing a lot of shade at the incoming Trump admin on his crime syndicate’s way out, so … let’s fight in the shade on this one. Ratchet up trade and financial limitations tier-by-tier on Beijing, while seeking strategic alternatives to Chinese goods. A paradigm pivot away from this malign influence may be just what’s needed for U.S. national security and general welfare.
There is a significant gulf between even between developing a mining operation to extract the materials in Wyoming and creating a processing facility to refine it. We made a massive blunder by allowing China to corner the market for these materials. Even without the inevitable flurry of rich environmentalists who will tie any effort to exploit these resources in legal knots, it would be a decade before the fruits of that discovery would have any effect on the international market for these materials. As the law stands, we probably will never exploit them–at least until we become a Chinese satrapy and Beijing directs us to do so.