By announcing a major move to nationalize all rare earths, is China showing its determination? The U.S. media began to panic, worried about China's further restrictions on rare earth exports, and how domineering is the real logic behind it?
China confiscated all rare earths and fined 5 million for illegal mining!
Since the current Biden administration took office, China's restrictions on high-tech fields can be said to be one after another. First, it exerted political pressure on various allies to avoid selling advanced process lithography machines to China, and then controlled the export of chips to prevent China from obtaining advanced chips with strong computing power, further locking the development path of Chinese artificial intelligent chips, and creating time opportunities for the United States to consolidate its leading position in the semiconductor field.
And for this all-round hostility of the United States, China is not without countermeasures, because China is not only the world's largest manufacturing country, but also a major exporter of key semiconductor minerals, and can carry out precise strikes on the United States and other Western countries in the semiconductor supply chain.
For example, starting from August 1, 2023, China's Ministry of Commerce announced countermeasures against germanium and gallium, two rare metals, which have a huge impact on the entire semiconductor supply chain in Europe and the United States.
In the same year, the number of F35 stealth fighters delivered by Lockheed Martin in the United States dropped sharply, with a total of only 98 aircraft, compared with 169 in 2022, which can almost be regarded as a "halving".
A large part of the reason behind this is that the AN/APG-83 radar equipped with the F35 fighter needs to use gallium arsenide in the manufacture of its radar TR components, and this gallium metal derivative happens to be on the list of China's semiconductor export controls, which effectively hits the United States to curb China's arrogance in semiconductors.
However, even after suffering such a big loss, the United States still did not give up on containing China in semiconductors, and after entering 2024, it has shown a trend of expansion, not only the United States wants to carry out export controls on China, but also enlists Japan and South Korea and other countries to negotiate together, so that the idea is to the maintenance of the chip manufacturing equipment that has been sold, showing an attitude of rushing to kill.
Under this important premise, China has announced new regulations on the control of rare earths, making it clear that all rare earths in China are owned by the state, and at the same time implementing the basic policy of protective mining of rare earths, and the relevant regulations will be officially implemented after October 1 this year. The new regulations also stipulate that in the future, the relevant industries of the system will be planned and developed by the state, and companies that regulate the relevant regulations may be fined 5 to 10 times the amount of illegal gains, and the maximum fine amount has reached 5 million yuan, indicating that China has an unprecedented determination to protect the strategic reserves of rare earths, a rare metal.
When it comes to the global supply chain, Europe and the United States are afraid that their lifeline will be cut off
As for the news released by China, some people are naturally happy and some are worried.
Some domestic netizens think that this is a great news, which means that China will completely control the strategic resources of rare earths in the hands of the state, and the phenomenon of illegal mining and illegal sales will be greatly reduced, and at the same time, for those Western countries that are strongly hostile to China, China also has an extra "rare earth card" that can be played at any time, which can effectively counter the Western world's differential treatment of China in the semiconductor industry.
In contrast, the Western media reports are somewhat intriguing.
Some U.S. media reported that China is the world's main supplier of rare earths, in the past ten years of time, 70% of the United States' rare earth imports are from China, although the domestic rare earths are nationalized, for national security reasons, but China has previously introduced a series of restrictions on the export of rare earths.
Late last year, for example, China announced export controls on graphite and its processing equipment, as well as controls on the technology used to make rare earth magnets and to separate rare earths.
The series of measures has heightened "outside concerns" that supply constraints on rare earths could increase tensions between China and the West, especially the United States.
In order to demonstrate the irrationality of China's control of rare earths, the US media even claimed that China's control of key resources such as rare earths, copper, and lithium was "preparing for a potential war", and even did not hesitate to compare Germany on the eve of World War II.
The U.S. media also mentioned in the report that China is in fierce negotiations with the EU on tariffs on electric vehicles, and China hopes that the EU can remove the tariffs, but this move also shows that even if the EU is unwilling to budge, China is ready to retaliate.
China's regulation of rare earths is not aimed at anyone, and some media should be heeded
From a practical point of view, China's control measures for rare earths, as China has stated to the outside world, are to unify the domestic dispatch of rare earth resources, not to target some specific countries.
In the final analysis, some countries are worried that when they implement a hostile policy against China, they will face unprecedented losses due to countermeasures from China, so they want to hype up various China-related topics to exaggerate the "threat" to other countries and brutally interfere in China's internal affairs.
But it is this mentality that has become the biggest obstacle to the development of bilateral relations between China and some Western countries, the reason why international free trade is called free trade, its biggest principle lies in the principle of mutual voluntariness, the whole world market has enjoyed China's rare earth dividends in the past, but Western countries are not grateful to China for this, but sanction China on rare earth-related semiconductor equipment, and even through these rare earths, to create some weapons against China, it is unreasonable to say anything.
China's unified allocation of domestic rare earths to prevent these precious resources from falling into the hands of lawbreakers is completely in line with the logic of normal people's behavior and the rules of the World Trade Organization.
At a higher level, behind this logic is still hegemonism and power politics.
In the perception of some Western countries, China should sell these valuable resources to the Western world at an extremely low price, so that they can use these resources to manufacture high value-added semiconductor products and further harvest the Chinese market, which is why the United States is so anxious to crack down on China's semiconductor companies. But they ignore the fact that China is also a big country with a strong internal market, and there is a soil for self-reliance, and the more they suppress China, the more powerful it will only make China's chips stronger.