Highlights

• China released a draft National Reserve Security Law on January 17, 2026.
• The law establishes the first comprehensive legal framework for managing national reserves of energy, food, industrial materials, and strategic minerals under centralized Communist Party leadership.
• The proposed legislation codifies a multi-layered reserve system with:
  • Government-held strategic reserves at its core.
  • Supplemented by enterprise and social reserves.
• The law explicitly prioritizes national security and market control capabilities.
• It positions China to use strategic material reserves as geopolitical tools.
• The law could potentially affect global commodity flows and Western supply-chain resilience through:
  • Coordinated stockpiling.
  • Release mechanisms.
  • Market intervention.

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China has taken a significant step toward formalizing state control over strategic materials, releasing a draft National Reserve Security Law for public consultation on January 17, according to a notice issued by the National Development and Reform Commission (opens in a new tab) (NDRC) and circulated by the China Rare Earth Industry Association.

The proposed legislation would, for the first time, establish a single, comprehensive legal framework governing all national reserves, ranging from energy and food to industrial materials and strategic minerals. While China has expanded its reserve system for years, officials now acknowledge a structural gap: reserve management has relied largely on fragmented regulations and low-level legal authorities rather than a unified national law.

The timing is notable. Chinese leadership—including Xi Jinping—has repeatedly called for building a “major-country reserve system” capable of withstanding geopolitical shocks, supply disruptions, and economic volatility. The draft law was formally added to China’s national legislative agenda in 2023 and is now moving toward enactment as the country enters its 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030).

The draft law spans 9 chapters and 60 articles, covering reserve planning, procurement, storage, deployment, infrastructure, oversight, and legal liability. It explicitly prioritizes reserves tied to national security, industrial stability, critical livelihoods, and market control, and codifies a multi-layered reserve model:

• government-held strategic reserves as the core,
• enterprise reserves and socially held reserves as supplements, and
• tighter coordination between physical stockpiles and capacity-based reserves.

For Western and U.S. observers, the implications are strategic rather than procedural. This law would institutionalize China’s ability to stockpile, release, and coordinate reserves across commodities and materials—including rare earths and other critical minerals—under centralized political authority. It strengthens Beijing’s capacity to intervene in markets, cushion sanctions or export controls, and deploy reserves as a macroeconomic or geopolitical tool.

Equally important, the draft embeds explicit Communist Party leadership into reserve governance, signaling that strategic materials management is being elevated from economic policy to national security doctrine—with legal teeth.

Public comments on the draft are open through February 16, 2026, via the NDRC website, though substantive changes are unlikely given the law’s alignment with long-standing policy direction.

In short, China is moving to transform its vast but loosely governed reserve system into acodified strategic instrument, one that could materially affect globalcommodity flows and Western supply-chain resilience in the years ahead.

Disclaimer: This news item originates from media associated with Chinese state-owned or state-affiliated entities. Information should be independently verified.