Exports of rare earths now require special licenses, but Beijing has yet to fully establish a system for issuing them, the New York Times reported.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20250414191508/https://fortune.com/2025/04/14/china-rare-earth-exports-halt-trump-trade-war-tariff-retaliation/
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
After Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, China retaliated on April 4 with its own duties as well as export controls on several rare earth minerals and magnets made from them.
So far, those export controls have translated to a halt across the board, cutting off the US and other countries, according to the New York Times.
That’s because any exports of the minerals and magnets now require special licenses, but Beijing has yet to fully establish a system for issuing them, the report said.
The last line is also in the post, but I think it’s worth stressing that they don’t necessarily intend to halt all exports to everywhere. Although I don’t like the Chinese having such diplomatic power over core industrial materials.
The USA found a massive stash of them recently
What do you mean a massive stash? Rare earth isn’t banded iron it’s not gold or copper from porphyry copper deposits it’s very spread out throughout entire continents and that’s exactly why it is hard to source, and a part of the reason why china succeeded was their government support eliminated risks of unprofitable business
The US and Australia ain’t doing shit unless they fund and afterwards support them, or create a state owned enterprise
I believe Australia also has a nice stash of them. I do wonder if part of the reason everyone is eyeing Greenland is for similar reasons.
The thing is, rare earths got their name because they are barely ever found purely on their own, they have to be separated from other metals which is a difficult and expensive proces. If I understand correctly rare earths are basically everywhere but you want to find a site with a high concentration in order to make it financially feasible.
More importantly, absolutely none of this has anything to do with China’s near monopoly on rare earth refinement. Rare earth minerals, even high density regions of them, exist all over the world. Digging them up is easy, but separating the actual minerals from the rest of the soil and rock is really hard. That’s the part that China is highly specialized in. No one needs to invade Greenland or fucking whatever to get access to rare earth minerals. The US can dig them up right there at home. What they need is to build out the refinement infrastructure. But they would prefer to outsource the extraction to other countries if they can because it involves strip mining vast swathes of land that could be used for other things.
All part of the Clownfish’s master plan! Yay!
He successfully put The Resource Wars into overdrive
Contrary to their name, rare earth metals are not rare
They are a finite resource. And China has the biggest reserves.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/rare-earth-reserves-by-country
They have the most known reserves. China has subsidized the rare earth market for decades, so capitalism hasn’t really bothered with their exploration elsewhere; there has been little incentive beyond “national security”.
There will definitely be considerable reserves in Canada, US, Australia, Africa, probably Russia. The problem is infrastructure, expertise, and the volume of highly-toxic pollution that mining and refining them entail.
Everything electronic, and dependent on electronics (everything), is about to see a lot of inflation. Yay!
To some small extent sure, but most of it was long explored during previous natural gas and oil booms.
What do you figure the odds are that any newly discovered deposits in the United States will be found inside of national parks, forests, or wildlife reserves?
