India, Oct. 18 -- you wake up tomorrow morning to find your smartphone dead, your laptop frozen, and your electric car refusing to start. Not because of a power outage or a bug in the grid, but because halfway across the world, China has decided to squeeze shut the invisible veins that keep our digital civilisation alive. This isn't a dystopian thought experiment. On October 9, 2025, Beijing fired what insiders now call the rare-earth bazooka. Two new directives-MOFCOM Announcements 61 and 62-expanded export controls on twelve of the seventeen rare-earth elements that power everything from iPhones to F-35 fighter jets. For the first time, licences would no longer be granted to foreign defence users, and even civilian shipments would face ...