Export controls are restrictions on the export of goods.  If a government wants to increase the production or use of some class of goods domestically, it can restrict exports of the goods.  Techniques vary, but include export quotas, export bans, and, in China’s case, substantially reducing the VAT rebates for exporting the goods.

China is now tightening its previously tight export controls on rare earth elements, through export quotas.  

Deng Xiaoping once observed that the Mideast had oil, but China had rare earth elements. As the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries has done with oil, China is now starting to flex its muscle.

Why the quotas?  To increase production in China, to the detriment of producing elsewhere.

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has drafted a six-year plan for rare earth production and submitted it to the State Council, the equivalent of the cabinet, according to four mining industry officials who have discussed the plan with Chinese officials. …

Beijing officials are forcing global manufacturers to move factories to China by limiting the availability of rare earths outside China. “Rare earth usage in China will be increasingly greater than exports,” said Zhang Peichen, the deputy director of the government-linked Baotou Rare Earth Research Institute.

This is also a national security issue.

General Motors and the United States Air Force played leading roles in the development of rare-earth magnets. The magnets are still used in the electric motors that control the guidance vanes on the sides of missiles, said Jack Lifton, a chemist who helped develop some of the early magnets.

Toyota and GM are affected in the production of electric and hybrid-electric vehicles.

The electric motor in a Prius requires 2 to 4 pounds of neodymium, said Dudley Kingsnorth, a consultant in Perth, Australia, whose compilations of rare earth mining and trade are the industry’s benchmark.

Mr. Lifton said that Toyota officials had expressed strong worry to him on Sunday about the availability of rare earths.

Toyota and General Motors, which plans to introduce the Chevrolet Volt next year with an electric motor that uses rare earths, both declined on Monday to comment.

And China is locking up production from non-China sources. 

Until spring, it seemed that China’s stranglehold on production of rare earths might weaken in the next three years — two Australian mines are opening with combined production equal to a quarter of global output.

But both companies developing mines — Lynas Corporation and smaller rival, Arafura Resources — lost their financing last winter because of the global financial crisis. Buyers deserted Lynas’s planned bond issue and Arafura’s initial public offering.

Mining companies wholly owned by the Chinese government swooped in last spring with the cash needed to finish the construction of both companies’ mines and ore processing factories. The Chinese companies reached agreements to buy 51.7 percent of Lynas and 25 percent of Arafura.

Free trade and China.  A phrase contradicting itself.  We need a national trade and economic strategy… because others have it and we cannot economically prosper without one.