As U.S. President Donald Trump turns up the tariff heat on China, Beijing is targeting ever more of the United States' critical material supply chains…Weird and wonderful metals such as antimony, gallium and germanium have already been sucked into the escalating trade war with China restricting exports and banning sales to the United States…Beijing has just raised the mineral threat another level by adding seven rare earths to its dual-use list of restricted exports…Rare earths are China's ultimate metallic weapon. The country has a vice-like grip on every stage of the global supply chain from mining to processing to manufacturing the permanent magnets that power laptops, electric vehicles and fighter jets…China supplies around 90% of the world's rare earth magnets, according to the CRU research house. Which is a big problem, since the magnets themselves are also now on the export control list…Magnets make the modern world go round and their inclusion on China's export control list is a major red flag for everyone else…Moreover, depending on just how tightly the export controls are exercised, the market impact can be explosive…Bismuth has surged from $6 to $40 per kilogram since the metal was put on the dual-use export control list in February…The good news, as it were, is that China has a long list of critical metals it can weaponise and a rare earths export ban will likely be kept in reserve for now…But as the trade war between China and the United States escalates, there's a strong sense that the rare earth time bomb is now ticking.

Clean energy systems require critical minerals. There are five core critical minerals, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA): copper, cobalt, lithium, nickel, graphite and rare earths. But there are many others, such as arsenic, bismuth, gallium, germanium, hafnium, magnesium, manganese, niobium, platinum group metals, tantalum, tungsten and vanadium, all of which play different roles in energy tech…As the chart above shows, China is a dominant player in the production of critical minerals, producing more than half of the world’s gallium, magnesium, tungsten, bismuth, graphite, rare earths and vanadium. 

China hiked its levies on imports of U.S. goods to 125% on Friday, hitting back at Donald Trump's decision to single out the world's No.2 economy for higher duties, while dismissing the U.S. president's tariff strategy as "a joke."…"The U.S. side's imposition of excessively high tariffs on China seriously violates international economic and trade rules, runs counter to basic economic principles and common sense, and is simply an act of unilateral bullying and coercion," China's Finance Ministry said in a statement…"Even if the U.S. continues to impose even higher tariffs, it would no longer have any economic significance and would go down as a joke in the history of world economics," the Finance Ministry's statement added…"If the U.S. continues to play a numbers game with tariffs, China will not respond," it added. However it left the door open for Beijing to turn to other types of retaliation, reiterating that China would fight the U.S. to the end…On Thursday, Beijing said it would immediately restrict imports of Hollywood films in response to Trump's tariff increases. Earlier this week, China focused its sights on U.S. services exports, issuing a travel advisory for citizens visiting the U.S. and an alert for students considering studying in the U.S. state of Ohio.

Chinese battery giant CATL's on Thursday received approval from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for its listing in the city to raise at least $5 billion, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter…CATL's listing is set to happen in the second quarter of this year, according to two separate sources…In an earlier regulatory filing, CATL said part of the funds raised will be used to build a 7.3 billion-euro ($7.53 billion) battery plant in Hungary.