By Peter CATTERALL
Ganzhou, China (AFP) Dec 21, 2025
Buried in the reddish soil of southern China lies latent power: one of the largest clusters of crucial rare earths is mined around the clock by a secretive and heavily guarded industry.
The hills of Jiangxi province are home to most of China’s rare earth mines, with the materials used in a wide range of products including smartphones and missile guidance technology.
The flourishing industry is closely protected by Chinese authorities and media access is seldom granted.
In a rare visit to the region last month, AFP journalists were trailed and monitored by minders who declined to identify themselves. Companies did not accept requests for interviews.
Business has been booming: the number of rare earth processing points in China observed by the US Geological Survey jumped from 117 in 2010 to 2,057 by 2017. Most of the 3,085 nationwide recorded by the USGS today are clustered in the hills of Jiangxi.
Locals there told AFP that one rare earths mine was maintaining near-constant operations.
“It’s busy 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” a resident in the town of Banshi said.
Nearby, construction work was getting started for the day on a vast new industrial park housing facilities including rare earth processing sites.
The bustling mining region is the result of a decades-long push by Beijing to build up its might in the strategic sector.
Those efforts paid off this year, with a tentative truce in a trade war with the United States reached when China relaxed stringent export controls on rare earths.
Washington is now racing to establish alternative supply chains, but experts warn such efforts will take years.
In a sign of deepening concern among other Western governments, the European Union announced new measures this month to reduce the bloc’s dependence on China for securing the critical minerals.
The bloc said it would earmark nearly three billion euros ($3.5 billion) to support projects in mining, refining and recycling vital materials, and proposed the creation of an EU supply hub — the European Centre for Critical Raw Materials.
– Heavy metal –
“The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths,” former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said in a 1992 speech.
Since then, China has taken advantage of its natural reserves — the largest of any country — to dominate processing and innovation in the field.
The country’s rare earths industry is concentrated in two main hubs.
One is the Inner Mongolia region’s Bayan Obo mining district on the edge of the Gobi Desert, which is rich in “light” rare earths used for magnets in everyday items.
The other hub, around the city of Ganzhou in Jiangxi, specialises in “heavy” rare earths — harder to extract but more valuable because of their use in heat-resistant magnets, fighter jet engines, missile guidance systems and lasers.
The rugged hills surrounding Ganzhou are home to the world’s largest mining and processing operations of the strategic “heavy” elements, including dysprosium, yttrium and terbium.
And in the county-level district of Longnan alone, USGS counted 886 such locations, accounting for 31.5 percent of Jiangxi’s total.
An AFP team in Longnan saw rows of large rare earths processing plants in an industrial district adjacent to that dense smattering of extraction sites.
– ‘Moving mountains’ –
Heavy rare earths are formed over millions of years, as rainfall weathers igneous rocks, breaking them down and leaving elements concentrated near the surface.
Jiangxi’s gentle slopes, high rainfall and natural stone make it a prime location for such elements.
Mining methods in the region have evolved throughout the decades.
Authorities have criticised highly destructive approaches and cracked down on what they call “chaotic extraction” since the early 2010s.
One method — termed “moving mountains” — was described in 2015 by China’s top industry and technology regulator as “first cutting down trees, then clearing weeds and finally stripping away the topsoil, causing irreparable damage”.
Unlicensed mining has been drastically reduced over time.
Large signs in rural areas now warn against illegal extraction of rare earth resources. Others offer cash rewards for reporting such actions.
The industry has been largely consolidated into two huge state-owned companies.
On a Ganzhou street dubbed “Rare Earth Avenue”, construction workers bustled to complete a sprawling new headquarters for one of those giants, China Rare Earth Group.
But the province’s hills still bear the scars of bygone mining practices, with bare patches of red soil visible where vegetation has struggled to regrow.
Beetles block mining of Europe’s biggest rare earths deposit
Ulefoss, Norway (AFP) Dec 20, 2025 -
As Europe seeks to curb its dependence on China for rare earths, plans to mine the continent’s biggest deposit have hit a roadblock over fears that mining operations could harm endangered beetles, mosses and mushrooms.
A two-hour drive southwest of Oslo, in the former mining community of Ulefoss home to 2,000 people, lies the Fensfeltet treasure: an estimated 8.8 million tonnes of rare earths.
These elements, used to make magnets crucial to the auto, electronics and defence industries, have been defined by the European Union as critical raw materials.
“You have rare earths in your pocket when you carry a smartphone,” said Tor Espen Simonsen, a local official at Rare Earths Norway, the company that owns the extraction rights.
“You’re driving with rare earths when you’re at the wheel of an electric car, and you need rare earths to make defence materiel like F-35 jets,” he added.
“Today, European industry imports almost all of the rare earths it needs — 98 percent — from one single country: China,” he added.
“We are therefore in a situation where Europe must procure more of these raw materials on its own,” he said.
In its Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) aimed at securing Europe’s supply, the EU has set as an objective that at least 10 percent of its needs should be extracted within the bloc by 2030.
No rare earth deposits are currently being mined in Europe.
– ‘Rush slowly’ –
Due to environmental concerns, Rare Earths Norway has already been forced to push back its schedule. Now it aims to begin mining in the first half of the 2030s.
Its so-called “invisible mine” project is intended to limit the mine’s environmental footprint. It plans to use underground extraction and crushing — as opposed to an open-pit mine — and re-inject a large part of the mining residue.
But the location of the mineral processing park, where ore extracted underground would be handled and pre-processed, has posed a problem.
The company had planned to transport the minerals on an underground conveyor belt emerging above ground behind a hill, in an area out of sight from the town and largely covered by ancient natural forests, rich in biodiversity.
But experts who examined that site found 78 fauna and flora species on Norway’s “red list” — species at risk of extinction to varying degrees. They included saproxylic beetles (which depend on deadwood), wych elms, common ash trees, 40 types of mushrooms, and various mosses.
As a result, the county governor formally opposed the location during a recent consultation process.
Adding to concerns was the fact that disposing of waste rock would take place within a protected water system.
“We need to start mining as quickly as possible so we can bypass polluting value chains originating in China,” said Martin Molvaer, an adviser at Bellona, a Norwegian tech-focused environmental NGO.
“But things should not move so quickly that we destroy a large part of nature in the process: we must therefore rush slowly,” he said.
– ‘Lesser of two evils’ –
Faced with such objections, the municipality has been forced to review the plans and take a closer look at alternate locations for the above-ground part of the mine.
While there is another less environmentally sensitive zone, neither the mining developers nor the local population favour it.
“We accept that we will have to sacrifice a significant part of our nature,” local mayor Linda Thorstensen said.
“It comes down to choosing the lesser of two evils.”
Thorstensen supports the mine project, given the small town has seen jobs and young people move elsewhere for decades. It is “a new adventure”, she said.
“A lot of people live outside the job market, many receive social welfare assistance or disability pensions. So we need jobs and opportunities,” she said.
In the almost-empty streets of Ulefoss, locals were cautiously optimistic.
“We want a dynamic that makes it possible for us to become wealthy, so that the community benefits. We need money and more residents,” Inger Norendal, a 70-year-old retired teacher, told AFP.
“But mining obviously has its downsides too.”
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