Last week, Beijing made one of its most revealing strategic blunders in recent memory. The Chinese Communist Party demanded that all global exports and technologies containing any Chinese-sourced rare earth component must first obtain China’s approval.
In other words, if even a single gram of neodymium, dysprosium or praseodymium mined or refined in China enters your product, Beijing claims the right to veto its sale to the rest of the world. This stunning demand is more than an act of economic coercion; it is also an unmasking of the CCP’s true strategic blueprint for global dominance.
For decades, the world’s policymakers, economists and academics have debated the meaning of China’s rise. Was it merely a great power’s resurgence? A Thucydides Trap of inevitable rivalry with the United States? Or a new model of state-led capitalism that could coexist with the liberal international order? China’s rare earths ultimatum answers all these questions at once and exposes the fatal illusion behind them.
Unlike the Soviet Union, which exported ideology at gunpoint, the CCP’s path to global domination has always relied on dependency. The party seeks to weave the world’s economic arteries through its factories, its ports, its supply chains and now its stranglehold on rare earths, the indispensable ingredients of modern technology. The message is simple: Rely on us or fall behind.
Beijing’s rare earths monopoly is no accident of geology. It is the product of a deliberate, decadeslong strategy to control the extraction and refining of the elements that make up the modern world, including smartphones, satellites, wind turbines and weapons systems. By controlling 80% to 90% of the global rare earth supply, China wields a latent weapon far more potent than any aircraft carrier: the power to turn off the world’s technological lights at will.
Last week, by demanding preapproval for all rare-earth-linked goods, China effectively pulled the trigger. The world now sees what the CCP has long intended: not a peaceful rise but a coercive one.
This is not China’s first foray into rare earth blackmail. In 2010, Beijing halted rare earth exports to Japan after Tokyo detained a Chinese fishing trawler captain who had rammed Japanese coast guard vessels near the Senkaku Islands. The move sent shock waves through global markets and forced Japan to seek redress at the World Trade Organization. By 2014, the WTO ruled against China, compelling it to end its illegal export ban.
The lesson should have been clear. Weaponizing resources erodes trust, accelerates diversification and exposes China’s fragility. Japan responded to the 2010 episode not by capitulating but by investing heavily in non-Chinese rare earth sources and recycling programs. Others followed suit. China’s latest stunt will only deepen the world’s resolve to decouple from its supply chains.
In other words, the CCP’s rare earths coercion will backfire precisely because it reminds the world of a truth long forgotten: The real conflict is not China versus America but the CCP versus the entire world.
For years, Western intellectuals have comforted themselves with the Thucydides Trap narrative, the idea that a rising China and a ruling America are fated to clash out of mutual insecurity. Beijing’s behavior shows the fallacy of that framing. The conflict is not structural or accidental; it is ideological and intentional. The CCP does not merely seek parity with the United States. It seeks to reorder the world into a system of managed dependency and authoritarian control.
When the Empress Dowager Cixi declared war on all foreign powers during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, she effectively pitted China against the entire industrialized world. Today’s CCP has done the same, not with swords but rather with supply chains. Just as in 1900, the response will be collective. The world’s democracies, once divided by trade and expediency, are being forced into alignment by Beijing’s hubris.
China’s timing only amplifies its miscalculation. For months, Beijing interpreted President Trump’s patience in trade talks over rare earth exports as weakness, as a sign of desperation for a deal. Mr. Trump’s “Art of the Deal” approach has always rested on a paradox the CCP never grasped: He negotiates hard because he is fully prepared to walk away. When Beijing overplayed its hand, Mr. Trump walked and countered.
Within hours of China’s announcement, the United States imposed 100% tariffs on Chinese imports and tightened export controls on advanced software. More important, Mr. Trump’s hawkish Cabinet and the American public, now overwhelmingly hostile toward China — more than 80% negative in recent polls — rallied behind him. In trying to pressure Mr. Trump, Beijing succeeded only in uniting his government and destroying its last diplomatic lifeline in Washington.
The rare earths episode also underscores a deeper issue: China’s credibility deficit. The CCP cannot be trusted to honor agreements, whether trade pacts or diplomatic accords. The Phase 1 trade deal signed in January 2020 is a case in point. Beijing ignored its obligations almost immediately, reverting to state subsidies, forced technology transfers and export manipulation.
Once lost, trust is nearly impossible to regain. China’s repeated violation of market norms exposes the fiction at the heart of its WTO membership: that a one-party authoritarian state can play by the rules of free trade.
The West’s response must go beyond tariffs and token sanctions. The real question is whether China still qualifies as a legitimate participant in the global free trade system. How can the world’s open economies coexist with a regime that subsidizes overcapacity, kills competition through state-backed enterprises and uses strategic resources as political weapons?
The answer lies in rethinking globalization itself. The world must build resilient, democratic supply chains — networks grounded in trust, transparency and reciprocity. The alternative is to remain hostage to an economic order that rewards coercion and punishes independence.
China’s rare earths blunder is not merely a trade issue; it is a mirror. It reflects the CCP’s strategic DNA, its belief that control equals power and that dependency equals victory. In revealing that truth so openly, Beijing may have made its greatest mistake.
The world is now beginning to see China not as an economic partner but as a strategic predator. Once the illusion of partnership is gone, the age of Chinese monopoly will soon follow.