“I never thought it would come to this,” Donald Trump wrote on the weekend, Australian time. China last week announced strict, new controls on its exports of rare earths. And the gear needed to refine them.

Trump found it “impossible to believe that China would have taken such an action” and described it as “very hostile”. It is certainly a striking exercise of raw power against the US by a very confident Xi Jinping.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

Rare earths are the essential elements of the 21st-century economy, as indispensable as oil had been to the 20th. Without them, there are no modern computers, no smartphones, no radars, no MRI scanners, no electric cars, no wind turbines, no jet engines, no guided missiles.

But how could Trump claim to be surprised? The father of China’s long boom, the late Deng Xiaoping, observed as long ago as 1987 that “the Middle East has oil. China has rare earths.”

It was a warning. Just as the Arab oil-producing countries banned exports to some major Western nations in 1973, creating the world’s first “oil shock”, China had the power to shock the world with its domination of rare earths.

It has now administered that shock. “China tries shock-and-awe on Donald Trump” read the headline in The Economist magazine on Sunday. This may look like trade. It’s not. This is geopolitics.

Beijing digs up 61 per cent of all rare earths mined in the world, according to the International Energy Agency. More importantly, it has painstakingly amassed control of 92 per cent of all refining of rare earths.

Rare earths are not terribly rare. Many are more common than gold. But they are........

© The Sydney Morning Herald