"How China Found Its Most Potent Weapon" - by CWP alum Jessica Chen Weiss

“The Middle East has oil, China has rare-earth elements,” Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping declared in the early 1990s. This quote has been repeated a lot lately as Beijing has used its near monopoly on the rare-earth industry to effectively push back against U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest trade war. It is often cited as evidence that implicit in Deng’s statement was a coercive threat: just as Arab oil states weaponized their petroleum exports in 1973—cutting off the West to punish it for backing Israel in the Yom Kippur War—China would one day do the same with

How China Found Its Most Potent Weapon The Real History of Beijing’s Rare-Earth Dominance Gloria Xiong and Jessica Chen Weiss September/October 2026 Published on August 18, 2026

JESSICA CHEN WEISS is David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Center for China Analysis. From August 2021 to July 2022, she served as a Senior Adviser to the U.S. Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff.

Photo Credit: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/how-china-found-most-potent-weapon-xiong-weiss

By D.J. Cordier, Haxel, and others (U.S.G.S.) - United States Geological Survey, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26056854