"#9 How to Break China’s Minerals Chokehold" - by CWP alum Eyck Freymann
This essay is based on a Hoover History Lab working paper, co-authored with Joshua Stinson, William Norris, and Daniel Egel. Read the full version here.
In April, Beijing quietly reminded the world how much leverage it has over the allied industrial base.
After Washington rolled out a new round of tariffs on PRC EVs and batteries, PRC regulators responded by tightening export controls on several rare earths and processed minerals. Within weeks, procurement managers across North America, Europe, and East Asia were scrambling. A handful of factories in sectors that have nothing to do with EVs—electronics, specialized alloys, even defense components—started talking about scaling back shifts or retooling.
Beijing never had to announce a “sanctions package.” It just had to make life difficult for a few under-the-radar firms that depend on PRC refiners and processors, and let the fear of escalation do the rest.
This is the new face of economic coercion: not a dramatic embargo, but targeted interventions in thin, opaque markets where one country—China—controls an overwhelming share of processing capacity. In some critical minerals, that share is over 90 percent. Even where mining is geographically diverse, the chokepoint is in refining and separation, and that chokepoint often sits on the Chinese mainland.
Eyck Freymann is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University and a Non-Resident Research Fellow at the U.S. Naval War College, China Maritime Studies Institute.
He works on strategies to preserve peace and protect U.S. interests and values in an era of systemic competition with China. He is the author of several books, including The Arsenal of Democracy: Technology, Industry, and Deterrence in an Age of Hard Choices, with Harry Halem, and One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World. His scholarly work has appeared in The China Quarterly and is forthcoming in International Security.
Dr. Freymann advises policymakers in the United States and allied countries. He comments on national security issues of bipartisan concern in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, War on the Rocks, The Wire China, and The Atlantic, among other venues.
Before Hoover, Dr. Freymann held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and Columbia. He holds a doctorate from Oxford, masters degrees from Cambridge and Harvard, and a bachelors from Harvard, all in history and China studies.
Photo Credit: https://www.integratedstrategy.org/p/9-how-to-break-chinas-minerals-chokehold
