Beijing ¨C When U.S. President Donald Trump ?met Chinese President Xi Jinping last October, he rated the summit a ¡°12 out of 10,¡± and the White House said China would ¡°effectively eliminate¡± rare earth export controls and cease retaliation against U.S. firms.

Instead, even as it has refrained from overt criticism of Trump over the Iran war and signaled it wants a positive meeting between the two leaders, Beijing has quickly moved to expand its toolkit of economic pressure mechanisms aimed at Washington.

Since last October, China has enacted laws to punish foreign entities that shift supply chains away from China, tightened the rare ?earth licensing regime, banned foreign AI chips from state-funded data centers, barred U.S. and Israeli cybersecurity software from Chinese companies and is weighing curbs on solar manufacturing equipment ?exports to ?the United States. The pattern speaks to something more than reactive tit-for-tat, experts say, with China using the trade truce to build ?out a menu of economic influence tools that was, until recently, almost exclusively Washington¡¯s domain ahead of a planned summit between Xi and Trump in mid-May.

¡°The hope on the Chinese side is for a longer lasting, more broadly rooted truce, but it¡¯s very much that ¡¯if you want peace, prepare for war¡¯ logic,¡± said Joe Mazur, geopolitics analyst at Beijing-based ?consultancy Trivium China.

The truce, set to expire in November 2026, was forged in part by Beijing¡¯s threats last year to restrict rare earth exports to the U.S. Those controls caused shortages across ?U.S. auto supply chains within weeks, helping to bring Trump to the negotiating table with Xi at a meeting in Busan, South Korea, analysts said.

China has not idly bided its time since then and has enacted several potential retaliatory measures, that could be used against efforts to offshore production from the ?country or to impose measures against its raw material imports, that ?it feels are necessary to defend its interests.

In April, Premier Li Qiang signed two regulations ¡ª the first of their kind in China ¡ª granting authorities sweeping new powers to investigate foreign firms, governments and individuals accused of discriminating against China¡¯s industrial and supply chains, and ?enforcing what Beijing calls ¡°unjustified extraterritorial jurisdiction¡± ?against Chinese entities. Authorities may deny entry, expel and seize the assets of those found in violation. The conflict in Iran ?sharpened China¡¯s focus on new economic measures, particularly as U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened in mid-April to sanction buyers of Iranian oil exports, of ?which China buys ?80%.

Yuyuan Tantian, a social media account affiliated with state broadcaster CCTV, framed the new regulations explicitly as legal countermeasures, writing two days after Bessent¡¯s warning: ¡°In the past, our countermeasures were largely...