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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29367 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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American reactions are pretty bizarre, I don't understand how these people take themselves seriously. Take this «House Select Committee on the […] CCP»:

“China’s action today is an economic declaration of war against the United States and a slap in the face to President Trump amid his efforts to fight for a level-playing field. China has fired a loaded gun at the American economy, seeking to cut off critical minerals used to make the semiconductors that power the American military, economy, and devices we use every day including cars, phones, computers, and TVs. Every American will be negatively affected by China’s action, and that’s why we must address America’s vulnerabilities and build our own leverage against China. We should immediately pass my legislation to end preferential trade treatment for China, build a resilient resource reserve of critical minerals, secure American research and campuses from Chinese influence, and strangle China’s technology sector with export controls instead of selling it advanced chips. Xi Jinping only respects strength and I am ready to work with patriotic business leaders, our congressional leadership, and the Trump Administration to show China that its belligerent trade actions will be met with serious efforts to protect the American people, secure our supply chains, and cut off the flow of U.S. capital and technology into China."

Man, why the pearl-clutching? Why the shocked Pikachu face? It's unbecoming. This is explicitly a retaliation for your ongoing and already very impactful attempts to throttle their tech sector, you've declared this war many years ago when you sentenced Huawei to death. Moreover the fact that they'll eventually be in a position to retaliate via REE dependence has been known for well over a decade, and there's been a warning shot in Japan over Senkaku. You chose this route, your team was consistently rejecting all offers of deescalation because you believed to have escalation dominance. So own it. The extent of third-worldist hypocrisy is breathtaking:

China’s new rare earth export controls prove one thing: Beijing will weaponize any leverage it has.
America needs a new normal—not tit-for-tat.
We must strategically decouple and throttle the PRC tech sector before it’s too late. 🧵

Chinese export controls are obviously tit-for-tat for US export controls, so by new normal they basically mean unrestricted always-defect economic warfare. It seems that the US isn't really capable of negotiating, the notion that you can't always bully your way to an objective is alien to these folks (we've already seen this with Bessent's "China has revealed itself as a bad actor"). There's the assumption that the US (or at least "with allies") necessarily possesses some hidden strength that can be activated to indignantly reject the adversary's offer.

Well, maybe there is. I'm optimistic that out-of-China production can be scaled up in a matter of years, if no deal is made. Primarily China intends to cripple defense applications, and frankly how can you object to that, this idea «greedy communists will sell us the materiel to shoot them with» has always been risible. They are also likely going to suppress the planned reindustrialization and (very dubious) robotic labor revolution in the US. All of that «just» reduces CAGR in a wide range of industries for the next 3-7 years, while Chinese physical productive capacity keeps growing exponentially. The demand for chips, though, will definitely be met. In the meantime, the US will have to capitalize even harder on its software/AI advantage. We'll see which is more important.

Personally, I would not put any more stock into that announcement than in the announcement about the autism-paracetamol link. Trump has been known to chicken out before.

I am also unsure what the CCP really wants. Perhaps getting full access to ASML products is really the hill they want to die on. Or they could be satisfied with a bunch of AI chips. Or it might be about Trump's tariffs.

My understanding is that REE refining infrastructure is something the US could easily sink a whole lot of money in before getting anywhere, even if the goal is just strategic and not competing on the REE world market.

That is kinda the difference between REE and chip manufacturing: if you can only build chips which have a feature size 10x larger than the latest TSMC fabs, there are still a lot of niches you can compete in. If you can only refine REE at 10x the costs that China has, you will not be able to compete once they undo their embargo.

I think the market-based way the US could handle this is to commit to buying a certain amount of REE which is refined without tech from China per year for their defense sector for the foreseeable future. Of course, future presidents may not honor such a commitment. The alternative is that the US directly invests in such firms.

Personally, I think Trump will try to give the CCP what they want, especially if it is just some AI chips instead of the capability to build their own.

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