Rare earth metals were an afterthought for most world leaders until China temporarily suspended most exports of them a couple of months ago.
But for almost half a century, they have received attention from the very top of the Chinese government.
During his 27-year rule in China, Mao Zedong focused often on increasing how much iron and steel China produced, but seldom on its quality. The result was high production of weak iron and steel that could not meet the needs of the industry.
In the late 1940s, metallurgists in Britain and the United States had developed a fairly low-tech way to improve the quality of ductile iron, which is widely used for pipelines, car parts and other applications. The secret? Add a dash of the rare earth cerium to the metal while it is still molten. It was one of the early industrial uses of rare earths. And unlike most kinds of rare earths, cerium was fairly easy to chemically separate from ore.
When Deng Xiaoping emerged as China’s paramount leader in 1978, he moved quickly to fix the country’s iron and steel industry. Mr. Deng named a top technocrat, Fang Yi, as a vice premier and also as the director of the powerful State Science and Technology Commission.
Mr. Fang immediately took top geologists and scientists to Baotou, a city in China’s Inner Mongolia that had vast steel mills and the country’s largest iron ore mine nearby. Baotou had already made much of the iron and steel for China’s tanks and artillery under Mao, but Mr. Fang’s team made an important decision to extract more than iron from the mine.
The city’s iron ore deposit was laced with large quantities of so-called light rare earths. These included not just cerium, for ductile iron and for glass manufacturing, but also lanthanum, used in refining oil.
The iron ore deposit also held medium rare earths, like samarium. The United States had started using samarium in the 1970s to make the heat-resistant magnets needed for electric motors inside supersonic fighter jets and missiles.
“Rare earths have important application value in steel, ductile iron, glass and ceramics, military industry, electronics and new materials,” Mr. Fang declared during his visit to Baotou in 1978, according to an exhibit at the city’s museum.
At the time, Sino-American relations were improving. Soon after his Baotou visit, Mr. Fang took top Chinese engineers to visit America’s most advanced factories, including Lockheed Martin and McDonnell Douglas assembly plants near Los Angeles.
Rare earth metals are tightly bound together in nature. Prying them apart, particularly the heavier rare earths, requires many rounds of chemical processes and huge quantities of acid.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union had each developed similar ways to separate rare earths. But their techniques were costly, requiring stainless steel vats and piping as well as expensive nitric acid.
China ordered government research institutes to devise a cheaper approach, said Constantine Karayannopoulos, a chemical engineer and former chief executive of several of the largest North American rare earth companies. The Chinese engineers figured out how to separate rare earths using inexpensive plastic and hydrochloric acid instead.
The cost advantage, together with weak enforcement of environmental standards, allowed China’s rare earth refineries to undercut competitors in the West. Facing increasingly stiff environmental regulations, almost all of the West’s refineries closed.
Separately, China’s geologists discovered that their country held nearly half the world’s deposits of rare earths, including rich deposits of heavy rare earths in south-central China, valuable for magnets in cars as well as for medical imaging and other applications.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Chinese refinery engineers mastered the task of prying apart heavy rare earths. That gave China an almost total monopoly on heavy rare earth production.
“The Middle East has oil,” Mr. Deng said in 1992. “China has rare earths.”
By then, he and Mr. Fang had already trained the next leader to guide the country’s rare earth industry: a geologist named Wen Jiabao. He had earned a master’s degree in rare earth sciences in the late 1960s at the Beijing Institute of Geology, when most of the rest of China was paralyzed during the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution.
Mr. Wen went on to become a vice premier in 1998 and then China’s premier from 2003 to 2013. During a visit to Europe in 2010, he declared that little happened on rare earth policy in China without his personal involvement.
Li You contributed research.
Keith Bradsher is the Beijing bureau chief for The Times. He previously served as bureau chief in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Detroit and as a Washington correspondent. He has lived and reported in mainland China through the pandemic.
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