IN EARLY 2020 Swedish battery-makers noticed something alarming. Their Chinese suppliers were no longer able to sell them graphite, a mineral crucial to the production of lithium-ion cells. The Swedes assumed the problem would pass. Yet three years on, as Chinese investments in the battery industry have surged in Europe, Swedish firms are still largely cut off. In 2020 China’s exports to Sweden of two types of graphite nearly disappeared. In 2021 and 2022 they vanished completely.
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Although China’s commerce ministry has issued no
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