China's Rare-Earth Truce Clock Runs Out November 27. Japan's Supply Chain Already Shows What Comes Next.

China's Ministry of Commerce has eleven weeks left on a suspension that most of the US electronics and defense supply chain is quietly betting will get renewed. If it does not, the ban it is holding back snaps into force on November 28.

The mechanism is a single sentence. MOFCOM Announcement No. 72 of 2025, issued November 9, 2025, suspends "the second paragraph of Announcement No. 46 of 2024" from that date "until November 27, 2026." That paragraph is the one that matters: MOFCOM's December 3, 2024 order banning exports to the United States, "in principle," of gallium, germanium, antimony and superhard materials, plus stricter end-use screening on graphite.

That ban was China's direct response to a wave of US semiconductor export controls issued a day earlier. It has never been repealed, only paused, and the pause has a printed expiration date.

This is not the same clock as the headline rare-earth truce, a pattern we laid out in Tariffs, Sanctions, and a Fractured Alliance: Three Macro-Geopolitical Shocks Reshaping Global Markets, most trade coverage has focused on since the Trump-Xi meeting in Busan last October. The White House fact sheet from that summit describes China suspending "the global implementation" of its October 9, 2025 rare-earth export controls and issuing general licenses that amount to "de facto removal" of curbs dating back to 2023. MOFCOM's own announcements use narrower language: a one-year suspension of six specific October orders, running to November 10, 2026, with no public confirmation that the general licenses the White House described were ever issued.

The gallium, germanium and antimony suspension under Announcement 72 runs seventeen days longer, to November 27, and covers a different, earlier set of controls. Two clocks, two texts, one geopolitical relationship, and neither guarantees the other survives if it lapses.

What the price data already shows

If markets believed this suspension were a formality, the arbitrage between Chinese and Western prices for these materials would have collapsed by now. It has not. Shanghai Metals Market data tracked through August 2026 (see Tungsten's Supply Crisis Is Flashing a War Warning) puts germanium at $3,104 per kilogram inside China against roughly $6,350 per kilogram in US warehouses, a premium of about 105%, up from 83% in July. Gallium metal has traded at a similar multiple over the same stretch: roughly $2,100 per kilogram in Western warehouses against $247 domestically in China, according to Asia Times reporting citing the same benchmark family.

A gap that size persisting fourteen months into an active suspension is not a transport-cost story. It is a licensing-risk story. Every kilogram that clears Chinese export approval and lands in a US or European warehouse carries a premium for the paperwork, the case-by-case review, and the chance the review outcome changes without much notice. The suspension removed the flat prohibition. It did not remove the licensing regime underneath it, and traders are pricing the difference every day the window stays open.

Japan already ran this experiment

The United States does not need to wait until November 28 to see what a lapse looks like, because Beijing has already run a version of it on a different country. China's relationship with Japan soured after Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told parliament in November 2025 that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could pose an "existential threat" to Japan. Within two months, Beijing moved to restrict exports of rare earths, gallium, germanium, graphite and magnets to Japan specifically, tying the curbs explicitly to Tokyo's position on Taiwan.

The results show up cleanly in Japanese customs data. China's rare-earth exports to Japan fell 51% year over year in the first half of 2026, more than three times the 16% decline in China's overall rare-earth exports over the same period, according to Reuters reporting on Japan customs figures cited by Asia Times. Japan received zero gallium and germanium shipments from China in January and February, one shipment in May, and zero again in June. June customs data also showed no shipments of dysprosium, terbium or yttrium, heavy rare earths with few substitutes in magnet and defense manufacturing.

Japan's case differs from the US suspension in one important respect: it was never covered by a MOFCOM order with a printed expiration date. It is an open-ended political lever, and Beijing has shown it will hold that lever down for months at a stretch when the underlying diplomatic dispute does not resolve. The US suspension is scheduled to end on its own regardless of the state of the relationship, unless Washington and Beijing act to extend it. Whether that distinction matters comes down to what happens in trade talks between now and late November, and on that question, the two governments are not sending the same signal.

A truce Washington says it is not rushing to save

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Reuters in May that the United States is "not in a rush to extend" the broader truce, adding: "Things are stable." MOFCOM's own May press briefing struck a different note, calling an extension "in the common interest of both countries" and saying both sides "reaffirmed their commitment to continuing to implement the outcomes of the previous trade and economic consultations." By late July, ahead of a planned Xi visit to Washington, Bessent held a call with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng and posted that he had told Beijing the US "expects" it to "fully meet its commitments on rare earths and U.S. agricultural products." China's state readout of the same call described He Lifeng expressing "serious concern" over unspecified recent US measures.

That is the temperature of the relationship eleven weeks from the deadline: both governments describing extension as desirable in the abstract, neither describing it as settled, and each accusing the other of falling short on commitments already made. Complicating the picture further, China's April 2025 controls on samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium, heavy and specialty rare earths with no substitute in permanent-magnet production, were never part of either suspension and remain in force today, license requirement and all.

Washington is hedging, but not fast enough to matter by November

The US government is not waiting on the outcome. The Department of War announced a $174 million equity investment on August 31 to build a gallium production facility at Alcoa's Wagerup refinery in Australia, backed by Japan's Sojitz Corporation and Export Finance Australia, targeting 100 metric tons of gallium annually for radar and missile-defense applications. The Department of Energy followed on August 20 with $500 million across seven projects to expand domestic critical-minerals processing and battery-material capacity. Both are real commitments to a China-independent supply chain. They sit within the broader macro regime we track in our macro coverage. Neither will produce a gram of gallium before the current suspension expires.

Industry executives closest to the supply chain describe the squeeze in less abstract terms than government fact sheets do. Michael Hurlston, chief executive of Lumentum, has warned that an indium phosphide shortage could become more severe than the memory-chip shortage that hit the industry earlier this decade, saying Lumentum and Coherent together cannot meet current demand from Nvidia and other hyperscale buyers even under the present, suspended regime. Paul Slaby, managing director of Canada's Semiconductor Council, put the timeline for a China-independent supply chain at five to ten years assuming full cooperation and capital, a horizon that makes the November 27 deadline look less like an event and more like the first of several tests this relationship is going to face on a schedule Beijing, not Washington, effectively set when it wrote a specific end date into a one-paragraph legal instrument.

What to watch

The clearest early signal will not come from either government's public statements, which have so far told two different stories about the same summit. It will come from whether MOFCOM issues a new announcement before November 27 extending or replacing Announcement No. 72, the same mechanism it used to grant the suspension in the first place.

A silent lapse, the restriction in Announcement No. 46 simply resuming because no new order arrives in time, is a live possibility given how narrowly the two sides are currently talking past each other on the broader truce. Traders in the gallium and germanium markets are not waiting to find out (context in Three Geopolitical Shocks, Three Commodity Setups: Reading the July 28 Risk Map); the price gap between Shanghai and the warehouses of Ohio and Rotterdam already tells you what they think the odds are.

This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.