When I was in China, I read China Daily in the morning and watched CCTV in the bathhouse and it was all so fascinatingly boring. The paper is always about trains or tunnels or something autistic. And the TV is robots directing traffic or flood relief or people having meetings. You have to turn to the very back of the paper to get any explosions. I never saw anything blow up on TV, I just left the tub to eat the unlimited durian.

This is all to say, when China fights the White Empire, it's like one of their tunnel machines. Boring. But don't mistake their boringness for weakness. China is fighting a trade war of (rare) earth-shattering proportions.

The Trade War

The Chinese Trade War parallels the Iran War in many ways. America aggresses and violates, and China progressively escalates. And in both cases, the steps the good guys take are delayed (closing trade routes) while the White Empire flailing around makes immediate headlines. So appearances can be deceiving, and it can look like China isn't doing anything, unless you're willing to wade through a bit of boringness about rocks and lack thereof.

The fact is that China has America by the subatomic balls (rare earth elements) and also, increasingly, has the cojones to call their bluff. When America tries to third-party sanction them, they third-party sanction back. It's like what the Yemenis say, a siege for a siege and a blockade for a blockade, just much more bloodlessly. But this is a war, believe me, and it gets to the subatomic heart of the imperial war machine. The pressure got so bad, in fact, that the Empire declared a nominal 'ceasefire' last November, but that's about as real as the Iran one. Since then, there have been more tits-for-tats than a herd of cows.

(No) More Minerals

In Iran, the basic tempo has been that America escalates and then Iran retaliates, trying to teach them a lesson they don't learn because they're insane. Same thing is happening with China. For example, in April the American FCC voted to ban all Chinese testing labs, affecting the certification of 75% of US consumer electronics. The Great Satan is plucking American stockings, they'll be empty by Christmas. China responded by going even deeper, they banned the Responsible Business Alliance (among others), which produces the Reliable Minerals Initiative, which is some boring certification required to source even more boring rocks. Those minerals are the literal bedrock of most products. Now Americans won't even get coal in their stockings because they won't be able to certify it lol. You can see how the escalation ladder goes, and America is somehow hitting every rung on the way up.

Rare Earths

The elemental elephant in the room is rare earths, which are not actually rare. It's more that the industrial ecosystem to produce them is big, unprofitable and better suited for communism than capitalism. The US Geological Survey reports that, in 2025, 71% of US rare earth imports (18,100 tons) came from China and the rest were basically China in a trenchcoat. Even American 'made' rare earths probably require some inputs from China somewhere and are not the finished product. As the NYCrimes reports,

The Trump administration and the European Union are each trying to build mines for critical minerals and construct refineries that can turn ore into pure mineral powders and eventually into strong metal alloys. The production process is complex and can be dirty: Converting the powders into metals involves sometimes toxic chemicals.

Almost all of the world’s capacity for rare-earth-metal conversion and alloy making is in China. Many of the European companies targeted by China on Friday are small and medium-size enterprises that hold what little expertise remains outside China for the advanced processing of critical minerals.

You can see the subtle squeeze. The White Empire can, in many cases, make the dust, but not necessarily the metals and alloys required for actual products. And where they can, China is being surgical and targetting that production, hitting them where it hurts. When the EU(nuchs) imposed sanctions on Chinese companies, China responded with sanctions against obvious Rheinmetall but also obscure manufacturers like Sindlhauser (a rarest-of-the-rare yttrium alloyer) and Italy's Lafert Group, which makes motors for industrial automation. Thus the Empire's self-harm is doubled. They can no longer import the reliable, cheap stuff to power their own industrial, and their own meager rare earths industry is mogged ruthlessly.

These elements aren't even on my periodic table but China obviously has them ranked by importance and is tightening the screws every time America escalates. What Iran is doing to oil and fertilizer, China is doing to minerals and raw materials. According to the USGS,

In April 2025, China tightened its export controls on rare-earth elements, adding specific controls on alloys, compounds, metals, and oxides of samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium. In October, China expanded its rare-earths export controls to include europium, holmium, erbium, thulium, and ytterbium. In November, China suspended the October export controls for 1 year. The April export controls remained in effect, although China began to issue general export licenses to selected exporters.

As you can see, while American sanctions whip back and forth, China steadily tightens theirs, like a noose. The April 2025 export controls were never actually lifted. They were simply made more fine-grained through selective licensing. This makes for denial without denial, companies just get lost in the paperwork. And the sanctions on the good stuff snap back in November, which the markets are already pricing in. See erbium oxide, which goes into fibre optic cables, or doesn't.

As the FT reports, "“Market participants both inside and outside of China believe that export controls may be reimposed on erbium, cutting off erbium supply to the rest of the world,” said Maeve Flaherty, rare earths pricing lead at price-reporting agency Argus Media. Buying had “sharply increased” as users looked to stockpile ahead of a possible November cliff edge, she added." Erbium is just an example, this is happening to the whole category.

The effect of this is like Iran's closing of Hormuz. As Moody's (rating agency) said about occupied Europe's deindustry, "The impact on creditworthiness “is likely to be gradual and may initially be masked by inventory buffers” and “limited disclosures”." Like the fallout of the war with Iran, masked by (Chinese) buffers and American lying, the damage from the Trade War with China is all pending, while America keeps offending.

You can kinda see what America's doing here, but they're being wildly unstrategic about it. If you want to get around China's control of this industry, OK I guess, but then you'd actually want to get closer to China to get the capital transfered. You know, like China did with many industries, though non-maliciously. America would need to spend decades building up capacity before blowing up the relationship. Instead they've come in guns blazing and only to find they've turned to sausages.

Even their guns have 'Made In China' when you zoom in. "More than 40% of the semiconductors that sustain DoD weapons systems and infrastructure depend on Chinese suppliers." As I've said, they're attacking their own supply lines here. Lockheed Martin's CFO told investors they [only] had enough rare earth material for a year last year, so I wonder how that's going. Trump's been crowing about ordering more weapons, but where's Lockheed going to order the raw materials from? All of the Empire's promises of rearming to fight the Iran War are built on sand, and the sand is made in China.

Sanctions

Like American attacks on civilians in Iran which ended with their own military assets getting blown up, every attack America makes in the trade war makes their own position worse. In June 2026, the Pentagon released a 1260H list of companies they suspect of aiding the Chinese military. These included "ecommerce giant Alibaba, internet search provider Baidu, and automakers BYD and NIO," (via Reuters). The Chinese military is probably not ordering drones on Alibaba, looking up American positions on Baidu, and driving there in a BYD Shark to release them. These are civilian companies, sanctioning which only denies American civilians better products.

Beijing responded by sanctioning very specific companies, including MP Materials and USA Rare Earth, the champions of the rare earth rejuvenation attempted above. These two companies are suing each other, btw, to show you how well things are going.

Reuters quotes some ignorant George Chen saying, "Most of the companies are U.S. defence industry players or they have close connections with the U.S. government... Those companies are not going to ​do business in China, so the impact will be quite symbolic." If you've been clicking links above you'd know that's not true. Defence companies, especially, depend on China for raw materials. As a 2023 Govini report says, "Data from Govini’s Ark.ai, the software system for defense acquisition, shows that between 2005 and 2020, the level of Chinese suppliers in the U.S. supply chains quadrupled." And these supplies are in everything America is using up against Iran! You can see how the fronts are connected. On all counts, from military to manufacturer power, the White Empire is fronting.

Defence companies and defensive companies like MP Material and Rare Earths USA are affected by Chinese UNO Reverso sanctions, while Trump crows about holding all the cards, with a mirror behind him, Twitter-telegraphing his every move. America still needs Chinese inputs to make their outputs, especially for the weapons systems they're expending so wastefully in Iran.

UNO Reverso Sanctions

US sanctions are weird because they're not US sanctions. Most of the world ends up complying with them, out of fear of punishment. For example, Huawei's CFO was kidnapped in Canada because of Huawei dealing with Iran. But China doesn't have sanctions against Iran, what's the problem? And why is Canada getting involved? You can see the outlines of the invisible White Empire here, and how it works.

Since 2021, China has had a legal gun in its belt, though it hasn't pulled it. In response to lies from known genociders about a non-genocide, China passed an Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law. This law says,

Article 3: The People's Republic of China opposes hegemony and power politics and opposes any country's interference in China's internal affairs by any means and under any pretext.

Where foreign nations violate international law and basic norms of international relations to contain or suppress our nation under any kind of pretext or based on the laws of those nations to employ discriminatory restrictive measures against our nation's citizens or interfere with our nation's internal affairs, our nation has the right to employ corresponding countermeasures.

And,

Article 12: Organizations and individuals must not enforce or assist in enforcing the discriminatory restrictive measures employed by foreign nations against our nation's citizens or organizations.

Where organizations and individuals violate the provisions of the preceding paragraph and infringe upon the lawful rights and interests of our nation's citizens or organizations, our nation's citizens and organizations may initiate litigation in the people's courts, requesting that they stop the infringement and compensate losses.

The basic principle here is reciprocity. I sanction you if you sanction me, and if you want to involve third parties, I'll involve third parties. For years this law was basically theoretically, not enforced except quietly in 2024, in arbitration. But now the UNO Reverso card has been played quite publicly, in a court case we'll explore now.

You can just read about the case in SCMP, which does a good job (obviously?). But if you want my snark on the subject, that's for paying subscribers to proceed.