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President Donald Trump has abandoned efforts to arrange a meeting with President Xi Jinping after China tightened export controls on rare earth minerals this week.
“Very strange things are happening in China!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They are getting very hostile and sending out letters to countries all over the world wanting to impose export controls on every item of rare earth product and just about everything else they can think of, even if it's not made in China.”
“We have never seen anything like this,” Trump added.
Photo sharing: Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump. (Pedro Pardo – Poole/Getty Images; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The president said his relationship with China over the past six months has been “very good” and called the export crackdown “amazing.”
“I always felt they were lurking, and now, as usual, I was proven right!” he added.
The administration has suggested Trump might be open to meeting with Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference later this month in South Korea, but “there doesn't seem to be any reason to do that right now,” Trump said.
China has come to dominate the rare earth minerals and magnets industry over the past few decades and is now using its supplies needed for electronics around the world as political leverage.
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“It is impossible to allow China to hold the world captive, but it appears that this has been their plan for quite some time, starting with the Magnets and other elements that they have quietly amassed into some sort of monopoly position, a rather sinister and hostile move to say the least,” Trump added.
