This week, I decided to summarize the thread I have worked on for a while now since the announcement of China’s Rare earth export controls. I spent the first portion of the episode talking about why they did and why it’s effective. I spent the rest of the episode going through the thread I have on twitter/x to talk about the tech breakthroughs that they’ve had in the past year that allowed them to impose these sanctions from a position of strength.

This past month showed that among high tech/modern economies of this world, power comes from technology/scientific prowess. If you can wreck other countries’ economy through tech control, then your threats have bite. They are taken seriously. It gives you geopolitical power. But in order to impose your export control on others, you also need to have backup plans in the event that retaliations happen. China has made a lot of progress in the high tech sector in the past year that gave them extra leverage. And that would include the all important AI sector where Huawei actually created something really great. They are the only player out there that controls the full supply chain for AI. They have invested in many of the supply chain players to ensure that they cannot be cut off in the event of something big. As such, all the other breakthroughs do support AI. However, they also support other modern industries, because a lot of the supply chain is used across many industries.

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