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Low environmental standards helped China become the world’s low-cost producer of rare earths, but Beijing was also focused on helping the industry.
July 5, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
Rare earth metals were an afterthought for most world leaders until China temporarily suspended most exports of them a couple of months ago.
But for almost half a century, they have received attention from the very top of the Chinese government.
During his 27-year rule in China, Mao Zedong focused often on increasing how much iron and steel China produced, but seldom on its quality. The result was high production of weak iron and steel that could not meet the needs of the industry.
In the late 1940s, metallurgists in Britain and the United States had developed a fairly low-tech way to improve the quality of ductile iron, which is widely used for pipelines, car parts and other applications. The secret? Add a dash of the rare earth cerium to the metal while it is still molten. It was one of the early industrial uses of rare earths. And unlike most kinds of rare earths, cerium was fairly easy to chemically separate from ore.
When Deng Xiaoping emerged as China’s paramount leader in 1978, he moved quickly to fix the country’s iron and steel industry. Mr. Deng named a top technocrat, Fang Yi, as a vice premier and also as the director of the powerful State Science and Technology Commission.
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