China Announces Plans to Restrict Graphite Exports

Yeah maybe you shouldn’t like, make your entire economy dependent on a foreign country and then start publicly denouncing them as evil and threatening them with war.

I don’t know, I never really thought about it, but now that I am thinking about it, it sort of seems like a bad idea to do that.

CNN:

China has unveiled plans to restrict exports of graphite — a mineral crucial to the manufacture of batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) — on national security grounds, the Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs said Friday.

The announcement comes just days after the United States imposed additional limits on the kinds of semiconductors that American companies can sell to Chinese firms.

“At the moment both China and Western countries are engaged in a tit for tat, highlighting how protectionist measures often spread. Newton’s third law that every action causes a reaction applies here, too,” said Stefan Legge, head of tax and trade policy research at the University of St Gallen in Switzerland.

“At the same time, both sides of the dispute also realize how costly it is if geopolitics trumps economics,” he added.

China, which dominates the world’s production and processing of graphite, says export permits will be needed, starting in December, for synthetic graphite material — including high-purity, high-strength and high-density versions — as well as for natural flake graphite.

…

The export curbs were announced as China faces pressure from multiple governments over its commercial and trade practices. For more than a year, it has been embroiled in a tech war with the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia over access to advanced chips and chipmaking equipment.

In July, Beijing imposed export restrictions on gallium and germanium, two minerals essential for making semiconductors. One month later, its overseas shipments of the materials fell to zero.

Ivan Lam, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research, said China had previously imposed temporary export controls on graphite, with little industry impact, adding that the new rules were not a “complete ban.” Still, he predicts prices will go up.

“We believe that the average price of graphite will continue to rise in the future due to supply and demand imbalances, including Russia, which was one of the major graphite suppliers before the Russia-Ukraine war,” he said.

China has a massive hold on the worldwide supply chain of critical minerals needed to make EV batteries. It refines 60% of the world’s lithium and 80% of the cobalt, according to the US Department of Energy.

This is another one of those “it’s already happening” type situations.

China is just flexing right now, but if they want to start restricting exports of serious things, they can do that. They can shut down most of the world.

For whatever reason, China was made the center of the global economy, and then the same people that did that decided to start threatening them with war and regime change, citing the fact that they are immoral and committing an invisible genocide.