James Kynge

Yeah, my sense of this is that we often focus on the measures that the US has taken against China in the trade war and tech war.

And there has been a lot over the last five years, more than 3,000 Chinese entities, mostly companies, have been subjected to licensing requirements or other forms of US export control.

But as you mentioned, China has been much quieter recently

about its own sanctions against the US.

And as you've mentioned, it's actually tripled its use of export controls over the past five years.

There have been, according to a EU Chamber of Commerce in China study, there's been 30 times between 2021 and 2025 that China has put

export controls on and that's up from about 11 times in the previous five years and when we look at what's happening in each of these 30 times the picture becomes a little bit clearer and particularly what becomes clear is china's use of global choke points in supply chains

to exert pressure on trade partners that it wants to punish.

So there are 10 instances of China using global choke points in supply chains, such as the time last October when China put a whole slew of restrictions on exports of rare earths.

Rare earths are these crucial materials used in making many, many different technologies, often high-tech, around the world.

So China's shown that it will weaponize its supply chain on 10 of these occasions.

And in 10 other occasions, these have been different measures to coerce its trade partners to do what it wants.

But I think why this is becoming really perturbing right now is because last week,

there was a new set of controls.

These are called the State Council Regulation on Industrial and Supply Chain Security.

A bit of a mouthful there, but basically what these say is a whole load of legal rules and stipulations that are so vague that

that nobody around the world can actually ascertain what they really mean in concrete terms.

One of these rules makes it illegal to, quote, harm the security of the country's industrial and supply chains.

The country's, in this case, is China's.

So, I mean, what could that be?