The next front in the tech war with China: Graphite (and clean energy)
By Lily Kuo November 29, 2023
A new front has opened in the intensifying U.S.-China tech war: This time, it’s over the metals needed to power electric vehicles and make the computer chips and electronics that fuel the U.S. economy.
And Beijing has made clear its restrictions on critical minerals are payback for Washington’s efforts to curtail Chinese access to advanced American semiconductors.
“This is just the beginning,” Wei Jianguo, former vice commerce minister, said in July, when China restricted exports of gallium and germanium, which are used in high-performance semiconductors, weapons systems and solar panels.
“China has many means and types of sanctions it can use. If restrictions on our high-tech industry continue to escalate, China’s countermeasures will also escalate,” he warned.
China is now doing just that. From Friday, new restrictions on another key mineral — graphite, a soft form of carbon used in almost all electric car batteries, as well as semiconductors and nuclear reactors — will come into effect. The rules will require exporters of high-grade graphite to apply for approval, and were announced just three days after Washington released new controls to limit artificial intelligence chips heading to China.
It is Beijing’s newest and possibly most potent weapon to wield in its competition with Washington, one that could strike at the heart of American efforts to create green jobs while weaning the country off fossil fuels.
Washington has deemed all three minerals targeted — graphite, gallium and germanium — as “critical,” meaning they are key to the United States’ economic or national security and vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. The United States is reliant on Chinese imports for all three of them.
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China is using its dominance over key materials to exert political pressure, said Jost Wubbeke, an expert in Chinese industrial policy and co-founder at Sinolytics, a research consultancy. “The U.S. is also doing it very well, so that’s what China is trying to do.”
The tit-for-tat export controls underline how much U.S.-China competition has widened. China and the United States have been locked in a years-long rivalry over issues like Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Ukraine war and China’s human rights record. As the world’s two largest economies jockey for global leadership, export controls and protectionist policies are becoming a bigger part of the fractious relationship.
It’s no accident that China dominates critical metals, including another key set of minerals: rare earths, a group of 17 elements needed for almost all of today’s clean energy technology and advanced manufacturing, from smartphones to weapons systems. Between 2018 and 2021, 74 percent of U.S. imports of rare earths came from China.
China’s control of rare earths began three decades ago with targeted industrial policies and export subsidies, helped by cheap labor and a willingness to withstand the heavy environmental toll of mining and processing. The architect of China’s economic transformation, Deng Xiaoping, quipped in 1992 that “the Middle East has oil; China has rare earths.”
As of last year, China accounted for 70 percent of the world’s production of rare earths. China also refines more than half of the world’s lithium and 80 percent of its cobalt, both key parts of batteries, and dominates supplies of nickel and manganese.
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China is the world’s top producer of graphite as well as the United States’ single largest source of the material, accounting for a third of U.S. imports of graphite. Other U.S. allies are even more dependent. South Korea and Japan rely on China for more than 90 percent of their graphite needs.
Just as Washington imposed semiconductor export controls to slow China’s military ambitions, Beijing says its new restrictions on minerals exports will be “conducive to better safeguarding national security and interests.”
This is not the first time Beijing has used its chokehold over critical materials against rivals. In 2010, after a maritime dispute where Japan arrested the captain of a Chinese fishing boat, China blocked exports rare earths to Japan for two months.
Even as it targets graphite, China is not yet blocking American access to rare earths.
“If they really wanted to kill us, they would [restrict exports of] rare earths. We know they’re willing to use them,” said Gracelin Baskaran, a mining economist focused on critical minerals at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, citing the action against Japan.
Chinese state media and officials have long hinted that this is a possibility. This month, China’s Commerce Ministry issued new rules requiring that exporters of rare earths report details of their overseas shipments to the government.
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Chinese leader Xi Jinping stressed the importance of rare earths as a “strategic resource” during a visit to a magnet maker in Jiangxi province in 2019 at the height of the trade war with the Trump administration.
The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, then ran an article saying there was “no mystery” about whether China would use its rare earths as a “counter weapon.”
Just last month the head of the Nonferrous Metals Society of China told the Global Times that China’s prowess in rare-earth refining means it could impose “reciprocal sanctions” on competitors. A communiqué from a rare earths forum organized by the China Nonferrous Metals Industry this month called on the country to “consolidate the advantages of being a global resource power.”
Still, China appears to be allowing some room to maneuver with its recent measures targeting graphite, which the U.S. government had deemed critical in the short-term because of its importance to energy security and threats to supply.
The new restrictions are not a wholesale ban on graphite exports. Instead they let authorities pick and choose what companies will be blocked from importing Chinese graphite. Under the new rules, which categorize the metal as a “dual-use” item that can be used in military or civil applications, Chinese exporters must apply for special licenses and disclose the details of their buyers.
Chinese authorities can choose to block those applications in the name of national security, or they can continue approving them as has been the case for the last several years. Analysts said it won’t be clear for another few months, after new license applications are processed, whether Beijing really intends to limit exports of these minerals.
“This is a warning shot for a sure,” said Emily Benson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies focusing on trade and technology. “Will they really bite? Probably not, but it’s a sign that the more tools you use to combat China economically, the greater the risk of retaliation.”
For China, restricting the exports of raw materials like graphite could enable it to kill two birds with one stone: Not only will it punish the United States, it could also encourage Chinese companies to move up the value chain and export finished products like magnets, batteries, EVs, solar panels and wind turbines.
But the strategy is not without risks. Even some within China have criticized the controls.
Controlling rare earth exports would encourage more investment elsewhere and “weaken the international influence of our country’s rare earth industry,” Chen Zhanheng, deputy secretary general of the China Rare Earth Industry Association, told the Chinese outlet Cailian in August.
An industry analyst, Zhang Jun, said controls would only raise prices and encourage companies to move away from using rare earths. Tesla said in March that its next-generation batteries would be free of rare earths. Any restrictions on exports, on top of the dire state of the Chinese economy, would hit Chinese companies all along the supply chain hard.
“The market is so bad this year that many small- and medium-sized magnet makers cannot survive,” Zhang told Cailian.
The United States and like-minded countries — including Japan, South Korea and some in Europe — are already looking to diversify their supply chains to rely less on China.
Lynas, the largest rare earths miner outside China, is building a rare earths refinery in Australia. Production has resumed at a rare earths mine in Mountain Pass, between California and Nevada, that had been shuttered for years. Chile, Vietnam and Malaysia are all home to rare earth projects.
China’s measures on graphite, gallium and germanium may hasten the search for alternatives to Chinese supply.
“If China were to force manufacturers to look for other supplies they would be able to find them, given enough time,” said Scott Moore, author of “China’s Next Act,” a book about Chinese sustainability and technology. “There would be a cost factor, but it’s doable.”
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