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President Donald Trump has called off efforts to arrange a meeting with President Xi Jinping after China tightened export controls on rare earth minerals this week.
“Some very strange things are happening in China!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They are becoming very hostile, and sending letters to Countries throughout the World, that they want to impose Export Controls on each and every element of production having to do with Rare Earths, and virtually anything else they can think of, even if it’s not manufactured in China.”
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” Trump added.
The president said his relationship with China over the past six months has been “very good” and called the crackdown on exports “surprising.”
“I have always felt that they’ve been lying in wait, and now, as usual, I have been proven right!” he added.
The administration had suggested Trump may be open to meeting Xi at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation later this month in South Korea, but “now there seems to be no reason to do so,” Trump said.
China over the past few decades has captured a dominant position over the rare earth minerals and magnets industry, and now uses its supply, needed for electronics across the world, as political leverage.
“There is no way that China should be allowed to hold the World ‘captive,’ but that seems to have been their plan for quite some time, starting with the ‘Magnets’ and, other Elements that they have quietly amassed into somewhat of a Monopoly position, a rather sinister and hostile move, to say the least,” Trump added.
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