On October 9, 2025, China’s Ministry of Commerce added five more rare earth elements to its export control list and, for the first time, asserted the right to police how foreign made products containing Chinese sourced materials are used anywhere in the world. Five days earlier, Beijing had blocked a completely different target: a Dutch owned chipmaker whose Chinese subsidiary supplies transistors to European carmakers. The first move followed a tariff fight with Washington. The second followed a governance dispute with The Hague. Different provocations, different continents, same instrument reached for within days: an export license, switched off. The pattern is no longer coincidental. It is policy.
A Legal Architecture Built for Reuse
Beijing’s export control apparatus is younger than it looks. Until 2020, China regulated sensitive exports through a patchwork of ministerial rules with no unified legal basis, and virtually no history of using trade restrictions as leverage against a named country, beyond an informal and later denied rare earth embargo on Japan in 2010. That changed with two parallel instruments issued within months of each other: the Export Control Law, which took effect in December 2020 and consolidated dual use, military, and nuclear related items into a single framework, and the Unreliable Entity List, formalized that September, a mechanism explicitly modeled on Washington’s own Entity List. Beijing layered on the Anti Foreign Sanctions Law in 2021, then the 2024 Regulations on Export Control of Dual Use Items, which added a watch list for exporters who fail cooperation checks. Each addition gave Chinese regulators a legal, procedural basis for restricting exports that previously would have required ad hoc political intervention. The tools built to answer one country are now general purpose.
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