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- Beijing bans exports of germanium, gallium to American market
- Move is a swift reply to Biden’s escalation of tech curbs
China announced an outright ban on exports of several materials with high-tech and military applications, in a tit-for-tat move after US President Joe Biden’s government escalated technology curbs on Beijing.
Gallium, germanium, antimony and superhard materials are no longer allowed to be shipped to America, the Ministry of Commerce said in a statement Tuesday. Beijing will also place tighter controls on sales of graphite, it added.
“The US has generalized the concept of national security, and politicized and weaponized economic, trade and tech issues,” a ministry spokesperson said in a separate statement. “It has abused export control measures and unreasonably restricted certain products’ export to China.”
On Monday, the White House slapped fresh curbs on the sale of high-bandwidth memory chips made by US and foreign companies to China. That was the latest salvo in an intensifying campaign to contain Beijing’s technological ambitions.
China’s response targets metals used in everything from semiconductors to satellites and night-vision goggles. A Chinese export ban on gallium and germanium would deliver a $3.4 billion hit to the US economy, the US Geological Survey said in a report last month.
“Export bans on critical minerals have been in the hopper for some time and are intended as a warning,” said Joe Mazur, senior analyst with consulting firm Trivium China. “It’s a clear signal that China is preparing to strike back more forcefully against US economic pressure than it has in the past few years.”
President Xi Jinping’s government last year placed gallium and germanium under stricter government oversight as tensions flared between the world’s largest economies. Rather than facing an outright ban, however, gallium shipments were subject to licensing requirements.
Prices for both metals jumped after the controls were introduced, and trade data shows that the measures have already had a major impact on flows of the metals to the US.
There were zero exports of gallium and germanium to the US this year, which suggests that American industries were drawing on inventories or procuring the metal from other sources. The US accounted for only about a 10th of all China’s antimony exports.
Separately on Tuesday, three Chinese industry associations — representing the internet, semiconductor and auto sectors — urged Chinese companies to choose carefully when buying chips from US.
The post China Targets Critical Metals in Tit-for-Tat Response to US appeared first on Energy News Beat.
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