Beijing Cut Japan's Heavy Rare Earths to Zero. Takaichi Still Hasn't Blinked.
In June, China shipped Japan no dysprosium, no terbium, no yttrium and no gallium. Zero of each, according to Chinese customs data reported by Reuters. That same month Beijing exported 5,649 tonnes of rare-earth magnets to the rest of the world. Across the first half of 2026, shipments of seven controlled rare-earth categories to Japan fell 51 percent year on year, against a 16 percent decline globally.
That is not a supply crunch. That is a wrench aimed at one country, over one sentence.
The sentence was spoken on 7 November 2025. Asked in the Diet what might threaten Japan's survival, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi cited a Chinese naval blockade of Taiwan and military action to stop U.S. forces arriving, saying that could amount to a "survival-threatening situation" permitting collective self-defence. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) demanded she withdraw it. Nine months on, it is still waiting.
What Beijing extracted instead is a live demonstration of coercion's limits. It reimposed a blanket ban on Japanese seafood within twelve days, warned its citizens off travel and study in Japan, froze approvals for Japanese films, banned dual-use exports to Japanese military end-users in January, and in February named forty Japanese firms across two restriction lists. Chinese arrivals fell 45 percent in December and 61 percent in January, dragging total inbound numbers down about 5 percent. South Korea took China's place as Japan's biggest source market, and Tokyo kept walking.
Takaichi, meanwhile, went out and collected friends. Eleven countries in ten months across eight trips, according to records compiled by Nikkei. Fewer than her mentor Shinzo Abe managed, and far more targeted: Nikkei counts seven of those destinations, among them the United States, Australia, Vietnam, India and Britain, as allies or like-minded partners. In April she launched the Partnership on Wide Energy and Resources Resilience Asia (POWERR Asia), some 1.5 trillion yen (US$10 billion), welcomed by leaders of sixteen Asian economies. In Vietnam in May she unveiled an updated Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) framework built on supply chains rather than slogans, and signed critical-minerals cooperation with Hanoi and Canberra. Defence spending hit 2 percent of GDP in fiscal 2025, two years ahead of the 2022 timetable, on a 1.1 trillion yen supplementary budget and a wider count of what qualifies.
Voters returned their own verdict on 8 February: 316 of 465 lower-house seats for the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the largest share any party has held in postwar Japan.
This week three lawmakers from three parties flew to Beijing to meet the CCP's International Department: a party-to-party channel, not a negotiation. Tokyo's position on Taiwan has not moved an inch.
Beijing set out to isolate a new prime minister and ended up financing her foreign policy. Every embargoed tonne is one more argument, made in Tokyo's favour, in capitals from Canberra to Hanoi.
ACI — Aric Chen | Insights