Goodbye US$, 70% of the world’s iron ore will now trade in RMB! 告別美元,全球70%鐵礦石將以人民幣交易!
Major Australian mining company BHP has agreed to settle its iron ore contracts with Chinese buyers in Chinese yuan (RMB), marking a shift from the standard practice of using U.S. dollars. 澳洲大型礦業公司必和必拓已同意以人民幣結算與中國買家的鐵礦石合同,這標誌著該公司改變了使用美元結算的標準做法.
They’ve pulled out the big guns! The West is stunned, realizing they never saw this coming… China’s strictest export control policy on rare earth technology is here! 出大招了!西方傻眼了,還可以這樣玩…最嚴格稀土技術出口管制政策來了!
They’ve pulled out the big guns! The West is stunned, realizing they never saw this coming… China’s strictest export control policy on rare earth technology is here!
On October 9, the first workday after the National Day holiday, the Ministry of Commerce dropped a bombshell announcement: export controls on rare earth-related technologies and overseas rare earth items will be implemented.
China’s rare earth technology exports have entered an era of stringent oversight!
The most decisive move? Cutting off American military-industrial companies—Huntington Ingalls’ rare earth alloys for aircraft carriers and Flat Earth Management’s defense data systems have all been added to the control list.
And guess what? The U.S. Department of Defense just signed an equity agreement with domestic rare earth suppliers, and now China is pulling the rug out from under them.
Consider this: 70% of America’s rare earth imports come from China, with dependence on certain critical materials as high as 90%. Last year, due to rare earth supply disruptions, U.S. companies faced order delays of two to three months, and magnet prices surged five to sixfold.
Now, things have gotten even worse—even technical support is being cut off. The rare earth mining project Pakistan just negotiated with the U.S. has directly fallen through.
The brilliance of this move lies in its “surgical strike.” China isn’t just restricting rare earth exports; it’s also controlling rare earth items produced overseas. For instance, Vietnam’s newly built rare earth separation line relies entirely on Chinese technology and equipment. Now, if they want to expand production? They’ll have to apply for a permit first.
The G7 was previously considering price caps on rare earths, but China countered with a “technological chokehold.” With 90% of the world’s high-end magnet production capacity in our hands, what alternatives do they really have?
Even more impressive is the adept use of the legal framework. These controls are based on the “Export Control Law” and the “Dual-Use Items Regulations,” with rare earth technology having been listed in the restricted catalog as early as 2001.
The West often accuses “China of undermining free trade,” right? Well, now we’re pointing to the legal provisions: if you’re using rare earths for military purposes in violation of non-proliferation obligations, who can you blame?
The most awkward situation now belongs to the Norwegian expert. Earlier, he confidently claimed on television that “Fukushima’s nuclear wastewater is safe to drink,” only to be left speechless by Gao Zhikai’s rebuttal.
Now, with the announcement of these rare earth controls, Western media have collectively fallen silent. Only Trump is left shouting on Twitter about “China choking us.” But he seems to have forgotten how self-righteous the U.S. was last year when it sanctioned Huawei.
When Washington declared an economic war on China’s technology ascent, it assumed it held the upper hand. Tariffs, export bans, entity lists and chip sanctions were meant to isolate Beijing, choke its access to critical inputs, strangle its technological development and protect American primacy. The US believed, actually bragged, at the time, it had stopped China’s technological development in its tracks.
Yet with remarkable precision, Beijing has now demonstrated that the United States is the one more deeply entangled in – and dependent upon – China’s command of critical material supply chains.
Exactly.
China’s latest round of export controls on lithium batteries, graphite anode materials, and rare earth technologies amounts to the most significant intensification yet in the global race for material sovereignty. The measures are framed in terms of “national security,” and necessities to meet China’s obligations to not accelerate arms proliferation. At the same time, the strategic timing and scope make clear their geopolitical intent: to again expose the material vulnerability of a country that has worked tirelessly to encircle, contain and repress China, but which itself cannot easily reconstitute its own productive base.
The new Chinese restrictions announced on 9 October 2025 extend beyond commodities to include the technological processes required to make them useful. This is a deft and also an important expansion of reach from mere resource control to technological chokepoint management.This is actually what the US did to China in terms of chips: not simply the chips themselves, but the tools to design, make them–any foreign manufacturer that had a US component or a US patent somewhere in any of its machinery was constrained from exporting to China. It was as CSIS called it, “4 point chokehold strangling with intent to kill”, “an act of war”. The US is now getting a taste of its own medicine.
In terms of graphite anode materials and lithium batteries, China will now require export permits for synthetic graphite and natural graphite materials used in the production of lithium-ion battery anodes. The restrictions also cover advanced production processes, including granulation, continuous graphitisation, and liquid-phase coating. These are all key technologies that determine battery performance and durability. These technologies are essential for electric vehicles (EVs), consumer electronics and grid-scale energy storage systems. China currently accounts for over 90% of the world’s graphite anode production and dominates every stage of the lithium battery value chain.
As for rare earth-related technologies China has added a sweeping range of rare earth technologies to its export control list, including those involved inmining, smelting, separation, magnetic material manufacturing, and secondary resource recycling. These underpin the manufacture of permanent magnets used in wind turbines, electric motors, guided missile systems, fighter jets, satellite components and semiconductors. China refines nearly 90% of global rare earth oxides and produces the vast majority of neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets used in high-performance electronics.
Together, these measures strike at the heart of the clean energy, defence, and semiconductor industries. In other words, the very sectors the U.S. has spent billions trying to re-shore through the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act under the Biden Administration, and which are central to the Trump Administration’s vision for America’s techno-military future. (The focus on clean energy has been dropped.)
According to the Pentagon, over 78% of U.S. military systems rely on materials sourced directly or indirectly from China. Rare earths are used in everything from jet engines and precision-guided munitions to radar systems and nuclear submarine components. A disruption in Chinese supply chains would delay weapons production and maintenance schedules. The U.S. has some rare earth deposits but lacks refining and metallurgical expertise; ironically, these were offshored to China decades ago. Rebuilding domestic refining capacity could take 5–10 years and cost billions, even before environmental approvals and workforce training are considered. Against this backdrop, China’s export restrictions can be seen to be a massive boost to world peace.
While U.S. policymakers focus on lithography and chip design, the less glamorous but critical material inputs – rare earths, gallium, germanium and graphite – remain overwhelmingly Chinese. Rare earth magnets are essential in chip fabrication equipment and data centre cooling systems. Restrictions on graphite and high-purity processing technologies will squeeze the semiconductor value chain from the bottom up, affecting everything from consumer electronics to AI compute clusters. This has wide-ranging implications. Without the rapid expansion of AI capital development in 2025 (data centres and the like), the US GDP growth for the first half of 2025 would have been, according to some estimates, no more than 0.1%. Put another way, the American economy writ large is flaccid at best, and AI-related capex is keeping its head above water. Disruptions to the input supply chains needed by the AI sector will jeopardise the sector’s expansion; it will also increase costs due to supply side disruptions. The impacts of China’s restrictions are double-barrelled: they go to the resources needed for augmenting the US electricity supply sector on the one hand, while also creating bottleneck risks in the supply of semiconductors. The Wall Street AI bubble may well be exposed to the sharp needle of Chinese export restrictions.
The EV revolution in the U.S., if indeed one could even call it that, depends on a Chinese battery ecosystem that dominates both upstream materials and midstream processing. China processes two-thirds of the world’s lithium and over 90% of the world’s graphite. U.S. automakers have only recently begun investing in local cathode and anode production, but the know-how and equipment still come largely from Chinese firms. Supply disruptions will increase EV costs, reduce availability, and slow decarbonisation timelines.
In short, America’s green and digital transitions are built on Chinese foundations. Now those foundations are shifting, or perhaps worse, those foundations have simply been removed.
It is one thing to announce subsidies and grand industrial acts; it is another to rebuild entire production ecosystems hollowed out over 40 years of offshoring. The United States faces a threefold constraint: time, resources, and knowledge. In terms of time developing new mining, refining, and magnet manufacturing capacity is not a matter of quarters or even years; it’s a decade-long process. Environmental permitting alone can stall U.S. projects for years, while Chinese firms are already vertically integrated and continuously upgrading. As for material resources, even if the U.S. opened every known domestic deposit tomorrow, it still lacks the refining and separation facilities to make those materials usable. Mining without refining simply shifts the bottleneck. Lastly, the US facesknowledge and equipment constraints. China’s near-monopoly on rare earth processing equipment and graphite treatment technology means that even friendly suppliers – Australia, Canada or Brazil – depend on Chinese machinery and expertise. The U.S. does not have the skilled labour force or capital goods base to replicate these processes quickly.
The result is a structural dilemma. No amount of rhetoric or subsidy can compress industrial time. The U.S. can print money, but it cannot print metallurgists, engineers, or processing plants. As I argued in May, the US can keep its dollars; China has the dysprosium.
Ironically, the U.S. has engineered its own isolation. By attempting to exclude China from global technology networks, Washington has incentivised Beijing to constrain the very supply chains the U.S. once took for granted. China, for its part, has pursued a measured escalation strategy; first restricting gallium and germanium exports in 2023, now broadening to rare earth technologies and graphite. Each move demonstrates both restraint and capability: China can choose when, where, and how to tighten the tap.
For the U.S., this is more than an economic inconvenience. It is ageostrategic humiliation. The self-declared arsenal of democracy is now dependent on the industrial capacity of the very nation it sought to cripple.
China’s new controls have revealed the underlying asymmetry of the global economy: one side makes things; the other makes narratives. The real economy of thermodynamics and materials trumps the economy of fictitious capital and simulacra. The U.S. may still dominate finance, media and military power projection, but without access to the materials that make advanced technologies possible, these advantages are increasingly performative.
New Zealand TV interview Taiwan US-China expert video: Global rare earth blockade! China launches a decisive move before the Xi-Trump meeting! The US military is finished! | North Korea’s 80th anniversary parade features senior Chinese and Russian officials! Li Qiang makes a high-level visit! | A permanent ceasefire?! Israel and Kazakhstan both make official announcements! Trump rushes to Jerusalem to claim credit! | Lai Ching-te’s Double Tenth Day speech: Is he tempting Trump with the Nobel Peace Prize? 台灣中美專家視頻: 稀土全球封鎖!習川會前中國出殺招!美軍完了!|朝鮮建黨80週年閱兵 中俄高層現身!李強高規格訪問!|永久停火?!以哈雙雙官宣!川普急奔耶路撒冷邀功!|賴清德雙十節演說 用諾貝爾和平獎勾引川普? https://www.youtube.com/live/EUT0y-4iQzg?si=0MhgiZhGaKQGxUCS 🇨🇳👈
The Yellow Sea. Early morning. 04:17 hours. The world is still half-asleep, wrapped in silence. The horizon stretches out in muted shades of gray, where the sky and water blur into one endless, lifeless sheet. The sea is calm, cold, almost deceptively harmless, until the silence is shattered. First, a low rumble. Then, a thunderous roar.
Out of the mist, a giant silhouette emerges, a warship, massive and commanding, cutting through the still water like a blade. Its engines growl with raw power, carving foamy scars across the dark surface.
Video with English subtitles: China learned its lesson from the US’s near-destruction of its soybean market between 2004 and 2008. China fought back, thwarting the US’s demonic plot. Now the US has no more cards to play. 影片有英文字幕: 中國吸取了美國在2004年至2008年期間幾乎摧毀中國大豆的企圖和教訓。中國反擊,粉碎了美國的惡魔企圖,現在美國已經沒有牌了.
After 20 years of planning, from Sinograin to China National Mineral Resources Group, this is an epic reversal! China is launching a comprehensive counterattack. 20年佈局,從中儲糧到中國礦產資源集團,史詩級反轉! 中國全面反擊.
Rare! After Chinese scientists were once again left out of the highest Nobel Prize awards, German media surprisingly stated… Viewing China through the lens of the Nobel Prize is a serious miscalculation of China. In fact, China is becoming a subject of study and research for Europe! 罕見!在中國科學家再次無緣諾貝爾最高獎項之後,德媒竟然表示…以諾獎看待中國,這是對中國巨大的低錯估,中國事實上正在成為歐洲學習和研究的對象!
Rare! After Chinese scientists were once again left out of the highest Nobel Prize awards, German media surprisingly stated… Viewing China through the lens of the Nobel Prize is a serious miscalculation of China. In fact, China is becoming a subject of study and research for Europe!
On October 8, Deutsche Welle published an article stating that although only one Chinese scientist has won a Nobel Prize to date, China is actually replacing the United States as the dominant force in the field of scientific research. The German media pointed out that it often takes decades after a scientific breakthrough for it to be recognized with a Nobel Prize.
The Nobel Prize reflects past scientific achievements rather than current research capabilities. In terms of today’s scientific research standards, China is gradually supplanting the United States’ position.
According to the German media, China has surpassed the United States in both the quality and quantity of scientific research. First, in 2024, mainland China published nearly 900,000 scientific papers, ranking first among the G20 countries. Second, when analyzing the world’s 150 most influential journals in natural sciences and medicine, China’s metrics in this area have also overtaken those of the United States.
The German media noted that as China rapidly catches up with the United States and competes for global dominance in scientific research, more and more European scientists are realizing that China is not only a competitor but also an innovation center worth learning from.
Clearly, after Chinese scientists were once again overlooked for the Nobel Prize, the German media has, unusually, spoken up for us. The message from the German media is clear: the Nobel Prize reflects past scientific achievements rather than current research capabilities.
The German media conveyed a very clear message: China’s strength in the field of scientific research must not be underestimated. Instead, Europe should pay attention to China’s scientific advancements and learn from them!
Of course, from our perspective, what the German media said is undoubtedly true. In fact, whether it’s investment in research funding, the number of STEM talents, or the emphasis on scientific research, we are absolutely among the global leaders.
The number of Nobel Prize winners from our country is indeed small, but this does not mean our scientific research capabilities are lagging. We believe that in the future, our country will produce a great number of Nobel Prize winners.
The ocean lies in darkness, the sky above still and silent. But beneath the calm, machines hum. In radar rooms scattered across the island chain, tension cuts through the air.
Screens flicker with faint signals, small, ghostly blips that flash, vanish, then reappear like phantoms taunting their hunters. Operators lean in, adjusting dials, their brows furrowed. Something is there. Something is moving. But it refuses to stay visible.
“Multiple contacts!” a voice calls. “Range uncertain!”