China just escalated its economic blackmail against Japan by expanding export controls against more Japanese entities.
If Beijing thinks Japan has no leverage in return, it is making a very expensive mistake. Rare earths dominate the headlines. But there's another material that receives far less attention and arguably matters even more to advanced semiconductor manufacturing: photoresist.
Japan doesn't simply manufacture photoresist. It dominates it.mJapanese companies control roughly 70–90% of the global photoresist market, and over 90% of the highest-end ArF and EUV photoresists used for cutting-edge chips.
Making world-class photoresist isn't like following a recipe from a textbook. Tiny changes in formulation, microscopic impurities, batch consistency, and production experience can determine whether a semiconductor fab produces billions of dollars of working chips or millions of dollars of scrap.
South Korea learned this lesson during the 2019 Japan-Korea semiconductor dispute. Despite massive investment, replacing Japan's highest-end photoresists proved far harder than expected.
China faces an even bigger challenge. Even if domestic laboratories develop promising formulations, scaling them into reliable industrial production is an entirely different problem. Semiconductor fabs demand near-perfect consistency because every production run is extraordinarily expensive.
This is why seemingly "small" materials can become strategic weapons. A $5 billion photoresist industry helps enable a semiconductor industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Sometimes the cheapest component is the hardest to replace. And that's often the most powerful leverage of all.
New rule: Anyone who is about to write a "all workers will be replaced by machines" essay needs to first read On Machinery by David Ricardo (yes, that David Ricardo), because he probably wrote your essay...in 1817.
Soldiers of the Venezuelan regime are busy looking through the homes of victims for things to steal instead of actually digging people out from beneath the rubble.
The regime is barely looking for survivors at all.