Under new rules China introduced in April and dramatically tightened in October, foreign companies must submit granular, confidential data to obtain a six-month import license for rare earth minerals.
The forms are extraordinarily detailed, according to people who have seen them, requesting product photos showing mineral placement, manufacturing diagrams and customer details. In some cases, the application requests annual production data for the last three years and projected data for the next three years.
Hoping to speed license approvals, the German embassy in Beijing gave China a priority list. This “white list” did help bigger firms get sign offs, but it left behind smaller companies without lobbying operations.
“With all the information they are in the process of collecting, the Chinese authorities are likely also getting a picture of defense industrial bases in NATO countries and how intertwined they are with each other,” said MERICS’ Arcesati.
Beijing has indicated it prefers bilateral negotiations with Merz over an EU dialogue.
As always. The EU must (and will) talk with China rather than Germany alone in a ‘bilateral negitiation.’
And the EU should eventually activate its anti-coercion instrument (which should have done long time ago anyway, but better late than never. I guess I read a post even here on Lemmy about it if I’m not mistaken). This might then lead to a range of EU-wide measures, e.g., blocking of Chinese imports of major products (EVs, small parcels from Temu, Shein, others) and /or imposing high tariffs on Chinese imports that are important to Beijing, and similar measures. The EU has already an anti-coercion tool, it has just never used it. Maybe it’s time now.
The long-term solution of alternative sources for rare earths is underway (agreements and negotiations with Australia, Canada, Ukraine, and others), but in the short-term the EU must stop buying Chinese stuff.
the German government has been slow to act — as usual with all things
People have been talking about rare earth minerals for years.
Are the people in power incompetent and we have to discuss how to replace them, or has the scarcity been expected and this information leak is acceptable?
The scarcity comes from China stopping exports. So it was always a possibility.
As for people in power being incompetent, then yes we are talking about Merkels governments, who have built NordStream2 despite knowing the potential problems it might cause with Russia. Then the Greens got the ministry for economics are started a program to fix that and also the rarer earth problem, but did not get very far. It just takes years to built factories, mines and so forth in other countries. Then Merkels party got into power again and stopped paying promised subsidies and so forth.
