GALLIUM
This is the oldest file in this archive.
On July 3, 2023, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced new export licensing requirements for gallium and germanium, effective August 1. On October 20, 2023, similar requirements were imposed on graphite, effective December 1.
I began monitoring this on September 17, 2023, after observing that gallium arsenide wafer imports from China to the United States had effectively ceased. I did not initially understand the significance of what I was recording.
Supply concentration.
China produces 94% of the world’s gallium and 83% of its germanium. The United States is 100% reliant on imported germanium and has no domestic gallium production of any scale. Gallium nitride and gallium arsenide are essential to radar systems, satellites, infrared optics, LEDs, and advanced semiconductor applications.
Alternative production exists in Japan, South Korea, Belgium, and Canada. Scaling these alternatives requires years and significant capital investment. Price-setting by Chinese processors can undercut competitors before they reach viability.
The 2023 controls did not ban exports. They imposed licensing requirements that increased administrative cost, processing time, and rejection risk. The effect was strategic rather than absolute: China demonstrated its willingness to leverage supply chain dominance as a policy instrument.
This was not new. In 2010, China restricted rare earth exports to Japan over a territorial dispute. The restrictions were eventually lifted, but they triggered a decade of diversification efforts that reduced China’s market share from over 95% to approximately 60% of global mined production. China learned from this. The 2023 controls were calibrated to signal capability without triggering the same diversification response.
The lesson of 2010 is not that export controls failed. The lesson is that China redesigned them to be more precise.
What I found. This began as a monitoring exercise. I was cataloging the materials affected, the alternative sources, and the timeline for each restriction. Standard analytical work.
By November 2023, I had identified a pattern that was not in any of the public analysis I could find. The pattern:
- Russia’s Northern Sea Route militarization accelerated in the same quarter as the gallium/germanium controls
- NATO’s Dynamic Mongoose ASW exercises in the GIUK gap occurred in the same window
- China’s Polar Silk Road ambitions, dormant since 2018, showed renewed signals in diplomatic communications monitored through open-source Chinese academic publications
- The Tanbreez rare earth deposit in Greenland — one of the largest outside Chinese processing infrastructure — was in advanced acquisition discussions with a US-registered entity
Every chokepoint I was monitoring was being contested simultaneously. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
I began this as a monitoring exercise. I did not expect to find a pattern. The pattern is that every chokepoint I monitor is being contested simultaneously. This observation led to
ARC-STR-2024-0615.
This file has been complete since December 2023. Everything in it has been confirmed by subsequent events.