GOOD MORNING FROM LONDON
28 AUGUST 2026. CHINA POST #636
CHINA AND THE FOREIGN MEDIA
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IN THIS ISSUE;-
#1 TWO ITEMS ON RARE EARTHS
#2 ONE ITEM ON JACK PERRY AND THE EAST END
(SUGGEST YOU READ THIS FINAL PIECE TO THE LAST LINE)
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EXTRACTS
- ON RARE EARTHS AND WORLD TRADE.
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
“The price of a niche rare earth element used widely in infrastructure has jumped by a third over the past two months, as traders and end users look to secure stocks ahead of a possible ratcheting up of Chinese export restrictions in November.
As of August 6, the European price of Erbium had risen by half since the start of June, while the Chinese price had risen by more than 40 per cent, in response to concerns that Beijing may further squeeze access to rare earths at the end of the year, when a year-long trade truce between the US and China is set to expire. China agreed last year to halt the imposition of its harshest critical minerals export restrictions yet as part of a deal with the US — but only for a year.
GRAHAM PERRY COMMENTS;-
With increasing regularity historians will look back on Seoul October 2025 as a Big Moment in Time. The dial moved. The balance of world power underwent a change. The U.S. had to back down in the face of China’s determination to stand firm. Trump blinked. He had over-played his hand. Politics was – from now on – always going to be different. China had played its Rare Earths card and the U.S. had no answer.
Up-To-Date evidence of the importance of Rare Earths comes with news that the price of a niche rare earth element – Erbium – used widely in infrastructure, has jumped by a third over the past two month. Why? Because traders and end users are looking to secure stocks ahead of a possible ratcheting up of Chinese export restrictions in November.
Erbium is among the broad range of metals in which China is dominant. Beijing, for so many years on the receiving end of economic pressure from the U.S, has weaponised Erbium. Erbium goes into the fibre optic cables that are widely used in the telecommunications industry and in the build-out of the data centres that will power AI. It is also used by the nuclear, medical and ceramics industries. It is very important.
How did the U.S. allow itself to be caught out? That is for the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Academic Historians and the White House and most of all for President Trump. Why was there no U.S. SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis in Trump’s first term as President and even earlier – his predecessors back to 1986? It remains remarkable that the U.S. – the home of top-grade Business Schools – completely missed U.S’s growing vulnerability.
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- EVEN MORE ON RARE EARTHS – NOW JAPAN
NIKKEI ASIA
“Japan is finding it increasingly difficult to source rare earths for electric vehicles and chipmaking equipment as Chinese trade restrictions squeeze supplies, forcing materials makers to use up inventories.
Import volumes of two particularly scarce rare-earth products – yttrium oxide and dysprosium – fell during the first half of 2026 to roughly 20% of their levels in the first half of 2024, before China imposed a series of export curbs, a Nikkei analysis of Ministry of Finance trade statistics shows.
Dysprosium-iron alloy is a critical material for magnets used in EV and hybrid vehicle motors. Yttrium oxide is a source of yttrium, which is used in coatings for chipmaking equipment components.
Japan imported 13 tons of dysprosium from January to June, down 82% from the same period in 2024. Imports fell to zero during January, February, May and June. Yttrium imports in the first half totalled 204 tons, falling 74%.
GRAHAM PERRY COMMENTS;
Nikkei Asia has reported that China accounts for roughly 70% of global rare-earth mining and more than 90% of worldwide production of rare earths for magnets. No question – Beijing is using its supply dominance in these vital industrial materials as a source of economic pressure.
But it does not have to be War. There can be peace and co-operation between China and the U.S. and between China and Japan. Long term – through the next one hundred years plus – and China does expect to surpass the U.S. and become the biggest economic power in the world.
In 2126 the experts predict that China will be the leading world economic power and the World will be a quite different place – in terms of economic relationships. The U.S. will still be big but it will have lost its swagger, its arrogance, its self-obsession. And the frustration? None of us will be around to view it. But it will happen. It is the direction in which History is firmly pointing.
China has to overcome its big property sector blow and it has to strengthen domestic consumption. China has strengths. It also has weaknesses. But it is addressing them.
Back to the Present. In April 2025, China’s Ministry of Commerce imposed restrictions on the export of seven types of rare earths, including dysprosium and yttrium. It placed further restrictions from February 2026 on exports to 20 Japanese companies and organizations of dual-use goods — items with both civilian and military applications.
The situation now is even more severe. And it is about Politics – not Economics.
The supply squeeze is already affecting Japanese companies.
- Metal materials maker, Mitsui Kinzoku, opened a new rare-earth sales office in China’s Liaoning province in April. But President Seiji Ikenobu said, “if the current situation continues or worsens, closing the office could become an option.”
- Mitsui Kinzoku had planned to manufacture rare earth products for chipmaking equipment in Japan’s Fukuoka prefecture and export them to China. But the company said that insufficient supplies of yttrium feedstock from China have left it with little capacity for exports.
- Rare-earth magnet maker Proterial has also seen imports of dysprosium and other materials from China dry up.
Rare-earth shortages “have not yet turned into a major production bottleneck,” said a representative from a chipmaking equipment manufacturer. But with inventories dwindling, disruptions to Japan’s manufacturing sector may be difficult to avoid if China’s export restrictions persist.
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REMEMBER THE QUESTION POSED IN CHINA POST #635?
HOW DOES A CHINESE NATIONAL FROM A MIDDLE CLASS EDUCATED BACKGROUND – A PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AT TWO UNIVERSITIES IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA – BUILD A RAPPORT WITH AN UNEDUCATED JEWISH BUSINESSMAN WHO LEFT SCHOOL AGED FOURTEEN YEARS TO SWEEP THE FLOORS OF A WAREHOUSE OF A SMALL LONDON DRESS FACTORY FOR 15/- SHILLINGS A WEEK.
JACK AND HACKNEY, STEPNEY + BETHNAL GREEN
A filial relationship is the personal, legal, or social connection between a child and their parents. The word comes from the Latin words for son (filius) and daughter (filia). It describes the duties, respect, and love that a child owes or feels toward their mother and father.
Jack Perry was my father. I respected him. I loved him. But this lengthy narrative is not about me, nor about me and my father. Nor is it about Jack the Father or Jack the Husband. It is about the role – modest but significant – that Jack played in world affairs at a key moment in global politics.
And he was not trained for the role. He did not go to a Public School and then onto Oxford or Cambridge. He did not take a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE). There was no Open University in his youth and little time to attend the few Advanced Education options. He came up the long way – the hard way. As – my narrative has revealed – he was compelled to leave school at the age of 14 because his family had fallen on hard times.
His route from the Streets to the Boardroom was not an unfamiliar journey for his generation. Many grasped the limited opportunities that they created for themselves but with Jack there were significant add-ons. There was Hitler and Mosley; World War II; Capitalism in Crisis; Socialism as an Alternative; and most significant in terms of international affairs of the time – the Rise of China. This narrative is very much Macro and Micro; the Big Picture and the Events Along the Way.
Jack was a bright pupil. He had a scholarship to a prominent grammar school. There were hopes that he would break out of his family’s impecunious economic circumstances and build a career for himself in Law or Business or Academia. He had the brains for it. Reading English classics as he lay at home in his bed suffering from asthma from the age of seven turned a weakness into a strength. He had a brain, intelligence and an intellect.
But the Big Career was not to be. The tailoring business of Jack’s father failed. There was no money coming in. The family had to avoid accumulating rent arrears. They had to hide from the Bailiffs by making late night secret departures to new and less salubrious accommodation. Life was hard.
The opportunity for Jack to build a career of note vanished. Family income – such as it existed was provided by Jack’s sister Lily from her work in the fashion business – and Jack had to supplement her earnings by finding work. He responded to the challenge and found work in the warehouse of a dress manufacturing business earning a meagre 15/- (less than £1) a week. The family desperately needed his small income. It was that important.
JACK BEGINS THE FIGHT BACK
In summary two things happened. First; Jack started his fight back. And Second – Politics caught his attention.
He started at the bottom of the ladder as the Assistant Warehouse Manager sweeping the floors twice a day clean of cuttings and trimmings that fell from the widely used sewing machines. He became a trimmer then a designer, then a traveller calling on customers with fabric to sell from a suitcase. He rose through the ranks and in just a few years – eight to be precise – he had become his own boss. Small at first but growing through the 1930s. Jack was able to ease the burden on his parents. He was not alone. His circumstances were not unique. His narrative is a narrative of the moment in time through which the Jewish East End lived. In one sense there were many “Jacks” in the 1930’s. The surrounding world and national circumstances created many Jack type stories. But Jack was different – I hesitate to claim – because of the unique blend of circumstances and politics. In one sense Jack was a Story of Many but in another, and important sense, it was a story of One Man in Politics in the UK, and, as part of the significant Changes in World Affairs that were underway. Read On!
JACK AND THE FAMILY
Jack and his wife, Doris, were married in 1939 and had five children (1941-1952). They moved from the East End of London to the more prosperous suburbs of North London. Jack – and Doris – were becoming middle class. But something else was happening at the same time. Politics was changing – internationally and nationally.
Step back a little to the mid 1930’s and Jack’s courtship of Doris whose father, Morris Shaer, was a home-taught Socialist of considerable depth. These intense late-night conversations (Morris and Jack) played a significant role in accelerating Jack’s developing political consciousness. Blessed with a considerable brain, and with Morris providing answers and guidance to many of Jack’s penetrating questions about society, capitalism, socialism, the USSR and the rise of Hitler, Jack’s political priorities began to take shape.
THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN
ITS APPEAL
The momentum was accelerated by the daily appearance of Oswald Mosley on the streets of the East End. Jews were feeling the pressure. Questions were being asked. Answers were being demanded and Jews were inclining to the Left. Jack’s journey was far from unique. Many Jews were beginning to reach the same conclusion – that the on-the-street leadership of the Communist Party offered vision and action today – not tomorrow. The Communist Party spoke to the moment. They had a message which reverberated within the Jewish Community. It was the Here and Now and many Jews threw their lot in with the Party.
The appeal of the CPGB (the Communist Party of Great Britain) was two-fold; First, because they offered direct action against the Fascist Blackshirts; fisticuffs became the action of first, and not last, resort. Jews cast their caution aside and responded to the Party’s call to action. Knuckle-dusters, not pea-shooters, became the Jew’s preferred choice of collective self-protection.
Second, this was the 1930’s. Capitalism was in crisis. The Wall St Crash of 1929 led people to ask whether the Capitalist Way was the Right Way. Or was there an alternative? Were things better in the USSR. A famous American commentator thought so. It was Lincoln Steffens who returned from a visit to the USSR and famously said – “I have seen the future and it works”.
There was no question that Jews that inclined towards the CPGB. Some – but not all. There were many Jews who hated Mosley and Hitler but could not bring themselves to embrace the CPGB and the USSR, and their reservations hardened after the War when the Great Power Alliance (US, UK, and USSR) against Hitler changed to the East-West Cold War of the 1950’s. Some Jews, like Jack, did become very Left Wing and other Jews, in numbers, turned against the Party for two main reasons; first, because they did not have any sense of commitment to Socialism; they were anti-Fascist and wanted to confront the Fascists and the Nazis but they had little sympathy for the class-free society that the USSR was bent on creating.
THE ROLE OF ISRAEL
There was a second reason – Israel.
Stalin was equivocal about the new State of Israel alternating between, on the one hand, a view that the new Nation was composed of Socialist pioneers (the kibbutz) and was to be welcomed and, on the other hand, a view that the new Israel came into existence at the behest of the U.S. who much preferred a nation in the Middle East that had close links to the U.S.
In summary, the CPGB was both well-supported by Left inclined Jews and, at the same opposed by moderate Jews who wanted Hitler and Mosley defeated but not at the expense of the Zionist Dream.
JACKS HUMOUROUS DEBATING SKILLS
When Jack wrote “From Brick Lane to The Forbidden City” in the late 1980s, he was quite clear that he was willing to reveal his left-wing journey. His politics were important to him on a personal level – he was forever engaged in lively and intense discussion with opponents of his world view and he was a formidable opponent.
There was one memorable occasion which underlined his wit and humour that was never far from his mindset. Jack was an active participant in the Board of Deputies which met monthly when representatives from synagogues in the UK would discuss and debate communal issues of direct interest to UK Jews. Jack acquired a reputation as a lively, if not pugnacious, speaker. He was often in the minority but with dedicated support from Jews who shared his left-wing ideas.
On one occasion in 1948 there was a debate and Jack was head-to-head with another Deputy who went on, in the 1950s, to become a right-wing Conservative MP. His name was Harold Soref and the day of the particular debate was also the date of Soref’s 30th birthday.
Jack and Soref locked horns. The assembled Deputies were aroused. During his address Jack made a strong allegation against Soref.
And the protest began. “Withdraw! Withdraw! Withdraw!” shouted Soref’s supporters at the diminutive Jack. The volume increased and the aggressive majority knew they had Jack in a corner – or so they thought.
Jack slowly rose to his feet. He was only 5’ 8” in height. The shouting subsided. He waited until there was complete silence. And then he started – slowly and deliberately. “I have been asked to withdraw” he said in mocking surprise. “Me? Withdraw? (Long Pause)
Wouldn’t it have been better if the father of Mr Soref had withdrawn 30 years and 9 months ago?”
Even today – I love it!
THERE ARE TWO UPCOMING TOPICS.
CHINA POST #637 EXAMINES THE NEED FOR OBJECTIVITY WHEN VIEWING CHINA.
AND THE REPORT OF THE PEW INSTITUTE WHICH FOCUSES ON REASONS FOR THE INCREASING POPULARITY OF CHINA.
GRAHAM PERRY – AUGUST 2026
