Reminder that China achieved its current dominance in precious metals thru sustained R&D over 30 yrs.
While Rare Earth is not rare, China's ability to mine, recover & process REE is far ahead of every1 else, since it continued R&D here after achieving 90%+ share in RE refining.
It has been really successful in ramping up its refining capacity & continue to improve its processing & recovery tech, so it can drive cost down -> enabling supply chain for clean tech & other industries.
While it's share of RE mining continues to decline, it has maintained its refining mkt share, bc it can work w/ companies in Brazil & Vietnam to recover RE efficiently & then process them in China.
nature.com

This goes beyond RE.
Recently CETC Shanxi achieved 99.99995 (6N5) purity on Graphite. natural graphite typically has 95% purity.
Semi & aerospace industry require 99.99% (4N) purity
It also achieved 40% production cost reduction + improved purity using self-developed equipment.
src mp.weixin.qq.com

They also made progress in discovering more mining resources.
20m ton of copper were found in Qinghai-Tibet plateau.
Full resource here could be as much as 150m ton.
Consider that Chile leads globally w/ 190m ton.
This potential in highland is a major breakthru for China.

China also now has world's 2nd largest Lithium reserves english.news.cn
Again more found in Qinghai-Tibet plateau
Raising China's share of Global Li reserves from 6 to 16.5%
New tech allows China to recover more precious metals from hard to reach regions

globaltimes.cn
Also found more Rare Earths, zirconium, hafnium & Helium.
+ 10 more Uranium sites including a major one in Ordos.
This was a good yr for uncovering more metals needed for high tech industries.