What to Know About China’s Halt of Rare Earth Exports

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Since early April, China has stopped almost all shipments of critical minerals that are needed for cars, robots, wind turbines, jet fighters and other technologies.

A long red freight truck with an open bed hauls stacks of very large white sacks up a dirt road past pine trees.
A truck hauling material out of a mining valley for heavy rare earth metals in April on the outskirts of Longnan, China.Credit...Keith Bradsher/The New York Times

Keith Bradsher

By Keith Bradsher

Keith Bradsher, who has covered the rare earths industry since 2009, reported from Beijing and Longnan, China.

Published June 3, 2025Updated June 10, 2025, 7:08 a.m. ET

China has suspended almost all exports since April 4 of seven kinds of rare earth metals, as well as very powerful magnets made from three of them. The halt has caused increasingly severe shortages that threaten to close many factories in the United States and Europe.

Why are these metals so needed, why has China stopped exporting them and, crucially, what happens next?

There are 17 types of metals known as rare earths, which are found near the bottom of the periodic table. Most of them are not actually very rare — they are all over the world, though seldom in large enough ore deposits to be mined efficiently.

They are called rare because it is very difficult to separate them from one another. Breaking the chemical bonds that bind them in nature can require more than 100 stages of processing and large quantities of powerful acids.

Image

A close-up of a gram of terbium.Credit...Romain Rabier/Hans Lucas, via Reuters

China mines 70 percent of the world’s rare earths. Myanmar, Australia and the United States mine most of the rest. But China does the chemical processing for 90 percent of the world’s rare earths because it refines all of its own ore and also practically all of Myanmar’s and nearly half of U.S. production.


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