Dramatic Drop Q2-Q3 of PRC Exports of 4 Dual-Use RE; Malaysian RE Miner Suspended; PRC RE Pivot at G20; Aclara's PFS; Lynas Troubles; and the lot
Rare Earth 27 November 2025 #189
Note
US Treasury Secretary Bessent had announced his hope for a rare earth agreement with China by Thanksgiving, along the wishlist - pardon - fact sheet that the White House had published after the Ulsan government to government meeting.
At the time of this writing the current US administration has no signed agreement on rare earth with China in hands.
China’s PM Li Qiang also affirmed the Chinese position during the G20 meeting in South Africa:
It is emphasized that cooperation should be open, win-win, fair and reasonable, adhere to the principle of voluntariness, while ensuring that relevant cooperation does not conflict with the international obligations of the participants nor with their respective domestic laws and regulations.
China’s rare earth dual-use license rules of 4 April 2025 are law, while the implementation of the draconian 9 October 2025 rules was suspended until 10 November 2026.
China climbs the moral highground and reasons that this dual-use classification would also be necessary under China’s international non-proliferation of weapons obligations. However, China has not specified which concrete international obligations it refers to (we can’t find any apart from the NPT, and in terms of NPT rare earths are as remote as steel and copper). Simultaneously China is happily licensing Chinese weapon exports to international war zones, supporting mass murder, other war crimes and causing immense human suffering.
How we did we get here in rare earths? Simple: outsourcing
Remember the outsourcing boom of the 1990s and early 2000s? Low Cost Country Sourcing? Every single CEO needed to have a China strategy. As late as 2014 you could not be an exchange-listed industrial company and not source in China. The stock markets would punish you severely.
There was a logic to it: If you had no China sourcing and your competitors did, then you would be out of business. That is how the US furniture industry collapsed.
Wall Street also has responsibility for the status quo. We can’t recall a single instance of a Wall Street analyst warning about excessive dependence on China 20 years ago.
While China was underpricing exports in the 1990s, from the early 2000s China’s economies of scale took over. Fiscal manipulation of export prices - selective VAT refund upon export - did the rest.
So, that is how we got here.
Absence of rare earth realism and sanity
Many rare earth hopefuls, usually among the most hopeless ones, claim to be addressing western defense needs. In reality, they address anything, but certainly not defense needs.
On 4 April 2025 China announced and implemented on the same day the dual-use license requirements on 7 rare earths, 5 of which no rare earth hopeful ever planned to address. Even though these 5 rare earth elements are at the core of western defense needs.
A pie in the face of western “defense” rare earth hopefuls.
Exports of dual-use license rare earths
Some analysts make the mistake of basing on year-to-date rare earth export data from China. They should base on the data since the implementation of dual-use export licensing of 7 rare earths - and that was 4 April 2025.
We compare China’s export numbers April to September 2024 to the same period in 2025 for the 7 rare earth elements subject to dual-use licensing since 4 April 2025:
