Beijing and Washington seem to have entered a tit-for-tat competition on trade. Late last year, the Biden administration placed restrictions on the export to China of equipment for the manufacture of advanced semiconductors and at the same time announced subsidies for the domestic manufacture of semiconductors. Washington even got Japan and the Netherlands to join…

Commentary In the latest break between China and the United States, Beijing imposed export controls on gallium and germanium. The two minerals, which Beijing plans to restrict starting Aug. 1, are critical to high-tech products like ultra-fast computer chips, electric vehicles, radar, night vision devices, missile defense, fiber optics, LEDs, and satellite imagery. China produces…

The Chinese Communist Party’s announcement of new state controls restricting exports of gallium and germanium on July 3 is retaliation for the West’s chip sanctions on the regime, according to a Taiwan-based defense expert. Su Tzu-yun, director of the Institute for National Defense Security Research in Taiwan, said that the move by China’s Ministry of Commerce and Customs…

The Australian government has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding to challenge China’s grip on supplies of key minerals while starting a critical minerals processing industry which it says could create 262,600 new jobs by 2040. Minister for Resources and Northern Australia Madeleine King released the Albanese government’s critical minerals strategy 2023-2030…

Commentary China featured large in a recent article carried by the prestigious The Atlantic magazine. In those pages, China experts from the American Enterprise Institute, Dan Blumenthal and Derek Scissors, dissected the change Xi Jinping has wrought in the country’s economic objectives since he took office in 2013. All his predecessors, from Deng Xiaoping to…

Commentary Japan seems to be planning an end-run around China’s trading power. As chair of the G-7 meetings scheduled for this May in Hiroshima, Japan, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is leveraging concerns about supply chain reliability to range this group of powerful economies—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—against China….

U.S. lithium giant Albemarle will deepen control of Australian lithium mining assets after revamping its joint venture with Mineral Resources (MinRes). In turn, the Australian Mineral Resources will also gain partial control of two Chinese mining plants operated by Albemarle. In the new deal announced on Feb. 22, Albemarle will initially deepen control over two spodumene…

An expert says the government should slash the bureaucracy involved in issuing permits for mining projects for critical minerals, as Ottawa plans for clean energy transition and decoupling from the supply chains of authoritarian states like China. In a webinar hosted by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) on Jan. 17, experts examined the recently released Canadian Critical Minerals Strategy….

Former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has warned that a war over Taiwan will cripple China’s economy and make it suffer far more than Western countries. In a speech at the Hudson Institute on Dec. 7, Morrison warned of a “mutually assured destruction” if conflicts break out between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan Strait. “There…

News Analysis Washington’s recent move to limit semiconductor exports to China has raised concerns that Beijing might retaliate by cutting off rare earth supplies, similar to what it did to Japan in 2010. According to the U.S. Geological Survey (pdf), China has the world’s largest rare earth reserves, accounting for 78 percent of the U.S.’s…