G7 Commits to End China’s Monopoly on Rare Earths

Udumbara Udumbara
Nov 17, 2025 - 10:55 Updated: Nov 17, 2025 - 04:18
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G7 Commits to End China’s Monopoly on Rare Earths

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Commentary

Beijing has threatened to stop the flow of rare-earth elements so many times in just the last few months that all the world’s major economies have decided to join the United States and have jointly committed themselves to developing other, non-Chinese sources of these crucial minerals.

At late October meetings in Toronto, Canada, energy ministers of the G7 countries—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—noted the crucial importance of these minerals to advanced technologies and decided to work together to find alternative sources of minerals and so do away with China’s present monopoly on their mining and refinement.

G7 activities will add to those efforts already being pursued separately by Washington. Eventually, all these efforts will undermine China’s current position of strength, given its almost complete control over rare-earth elements. That result, however, will take time.

A recent deal between Washington and Beijing should buy some time to develop these alternatives. Face-to-face meetings between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, while each was attending the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in South Korea, secured a promise from Xi that he would continue rare-earth exports unimpeded for at least a year. Even if the agreement holds for the full one-year term—and that is far from certain—it is still a compressed period to find, develop, and establish refining facilities sufficient to counter China’s present command of some 60 percent of the world’s rare-earth mining and 90 percent of refining.

It is with this long lead time in mind that the energy ministers in Toronto agreed, according to the government department Natural Resources Canada, to 26 new investment partnerships and several other steps to begin the search just about immediately. Combined with other efforts in the United States, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, and Indonesia, this push to discover and exploit non-Chinese sources of critical minerals will, in the fullness of time, almost certainly erode China’s current monopoly and the trade leverage it affords Beijing.

After all, rare-earth elements, despite the name, are not all that rare and indeed are found across the globe. For Beijing, every effort it makes to leverage its position in this matter will only heighten the G7’s and, more broadly, the United States’ efforts to hasten the day when this monopoly position disappears.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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