The rare-earth export restrictions have little if anything to do with Xi or with whether China evolves towards more freedom or more autocracy.

The export restrictions were not initiated by China, but they were an extremely moderate response to the US "sanctions" that blocked the sales to China of modern semiconductor manufacturing equipment, in order to eliminate the competition and to increase the prices in the DRAM and SSDs markets.

These US "sanctions", which were intended to preserve the monopoly of Micron et al., were the precondition that allowed the huge increase in the prices of memory products when the AI companies grabbed a large part of the production.

In my opinion, China has chosen extreme restraint in their response to the "sanctions" initiated by USA, presumably because they think that they would lose too much if cutting all the commerce with USA.

For me, I would have considered an unacceptable insult when another country declares that they want my country to remain a country that is technologically inferior and they would do anything to achieve this, notwithstanding anything of what they may have said and promised in the past. I certainly would not have wanted any further relations with such a country.

I think that an open and free China would still have many of the same geopolitical incentives that authoritarian China does. It would still prefer to dominate global manufacturing, use its resources and manufacturing capabilities for geopolitical leverage, and militarily dominate the seas and islands in its vicinity. It would still be nationalist. It would still want to reverse the "century of humiliation".

Type of government does have an effect on economic and military policy, but being a liberal democracy does not make automatically make a country less interested in pursuing naked self-interest.

>...put a break on moving in the right direction and now we need to react

- What do you mean "the right direction"? Do you mean the "open and free direction" that "Hey you can't have our Nvidia chips but must keep selling us cheap rare earth"? - And who are "we"? I suggest "we"'d better take care of "ourselves" instead of "react".

I don't think its Xi's doing vs Globalist looking only for signals which confirmed their views and ignored or outrightly rejected everything contrary.

Long term thinking is pretty bad too tbh when you dig in at what the different schools of thought imagine about the drivers of politics.

The electoral constituencies for the antinomianism, authoritarianism and victim-complex revanchism in the West that has prevented friendship between the world powers are all comprised of the same alliance between two groups repeated hundreds of times: moderately impoverished populist masses facing more of the same and industry oligarchs looking to return the west to feudal plantation economies as reprisal for any cultural slights they feel the public has given them.

The latter group always exists to some extent but the former group only exists because disposable energy (joules, watts, BTU, etc) per capita has been steadily falling since 1973. The golden age of shale exploitation bucked this trend but that has ended too. You can fiddle about with using different financial or interest rates proxies for this if you want but going into joules per person after extraction is the heart of the matter.

If this decline did not exist, we would not be in the world we're in by a long shot. But if you look at the predictions they're all off. The media, academia, popular culture and business culture expected continuous growth to put fusion power plants on Mars. The UN, IEA, DoE, Long Now people expected moderate growth to sustainable replacement of gas turbines with optimistic greentech buildout figures that use more lithium and copper than can ever be mined. The economic counterculture like NakedCapitalism and The Oil Drum expected Mad Max.

Nobody predicted the existence of the voter base that brought us the last run of presidents, they predicted different voter bases. Some of the predictors even imagined that the importance of Pennsylvania Avenue would slowly vanish without anybody minding.