Highlights
- China has systematically dominated rare earth elements across mining, processing, and manufacturing through strategic acquisitions and trade manipulations.
- Beijing is weaponizing export permits for critical minerals like dysprosium and yttrium, using supply chains as geopolitical leverage against Western economies.
- The West faces significant challenges in developing domestic rare earth infrastructure and countering China’s comprehensive industrial and narrative control strategies.
In a comprehensive research essay published by the India-based think tank Observer Research Foundation (opens in a new tab), Neha Mishra exposes the deepening entanglement of China’s geopolitical power with its rare earth dominance. Mishra presents a hard-edged analysis of China’s systemic control over upstream mining, midstream processing, and downstream manufacturing of rare earth elements (REEs)—a grip tightened further through aggressive foreign acquisitions, strategic retaliations in the trade war with the United States, and soft influence campaigns across Europe and North America.
Ms. Mishra’s case: Beijing is not just dominating a supply chain; it’s rewriting the rules of strategic interdependence in the 21st-century technological economy.
Mishra details China’s pivot to importing heavy rare earths from Myanmar following domestic environmental crackdowns, despite the latter’s sanctioned regime and widespread illegal mining. She spotlights JL MAG and China Rare Earth Group’s shadowy operations, including board-level influence over Western companies like Neo Performance Materials and stakes in MP Materials, Hastings, Peak Resources, and Vital Metals. Perhaps a piece of news not readily available in the West. Rare Earth Exchanges has not verified such claims.
Equally alarming is China’s escalating “geo-economic retaliation”—a bureaucratic licensing stranglehold over key REEs like dysprosium, lutetium, and yttrium, introduced just weeks after President Trump’s $100B tariff offensive. By turning export permits into strategic levers, Beijing has signaled its readiness to weaponize supply chains critical to clean tech, defense, and semiconductor manufacturing.
Yet the essay underrepresents the West’s slow but emerging industrial counteroffensive. While Mishra references the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act and the U.S. COMPETES Act, she does not delve into the execution gaps—namely, the lack of domestic refining, inconsistent permitting regimes, and inadequate funding for mine-to-magnet infrastructure. Also missing is any serious evaluation of non-Chinese refining capacity in Southeast Asia, the Gulf, or Africa.
Finally, Mishra warns of China’s narrative influence via the Rare Earth Industry Association and cultural sponsorships, but stops short of calling out Western firms that remain entangled in offtake agreements with Chinese SOEs. As the global race for REEs intensifies, her work serves as a sharp wake-up call: without structural resilience and strategic clarity, the West may lose not just access, but control.
Source: Neha Mishra, “China’s Strategic Control Over Rare Earths: Global Supply Chain Implications (opens in a new tab)”, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), May 1, 2025
Neha Mishra is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Air Power Studies (CAPS) in New Delhi. Her research interests include critical mineral supply chains, renewable energy policy, and regional geo-economic dynamics.
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