Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zuzana Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we will talk about China. China's imposed export controls on exports of rare earths and rare earth magnets,

products we talk about much more frequently these days than we used to. But there's an awful other things going on with China at the moment.

Trump will meet President Xi in South Korea.

He will visit China next year.

The EU has a broader trade issue with China.

And in many respects, the tragedy of the EU is that it is technologically dependent on both the United States and China and squeezed in between and a significant victim of the export controls.

So, Jack, can you run us through what China did and what it might do to us?

What China did was earlier this month, it significantly expanded its export control regime for rarerous, right?

So there had already been an export control regime in place, which doesn't mean necessarily

that there's a full ban on the export of rarerous, but it means firms would need a license to export.

And basically what it did is it

extended it to a range of different products, you know, magnets and things containing rare earths.

So this kind of mirrored, for instance, the way that say some US export controls work where

it's not just about exporting a particular product from the United

States, but it's that U.S. derived product's role in the supply chain. So China's new rare earth

export controls work in a similar fashion, right, where you might be trying to export a product

which contains Chinese rare earths, and then you would need a license to export that product and so on.

So that really

significantly expands the scope of the export control restrictions, and it causes complications

in a number of different industries, right? Firstly, because China is so dominant in rare earths, and

secondly, because they are quite important for a number of other different industries.

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