China's Rare Earth Magnet Exports to the US Fell 21% in August Ahead of Thursday's Trump-Xi Summit

Since Beijing agreed in the October 2025 Busan détente to suspend its broadest rare earth export controls until November 10, 2026, monthly magnet shipments to the US still haven't returned to normal. Chinese customs data released Sunday show shipments fell another 21% in August, to 512 tons, down from the month before, according to Mining.com.

Shipments are running at an average of about 504 tons a month so far this year, still below the 621-ton monthly average from 2024, before China's April 2025 controls hit. President Trump and Xi Jinping are set to meet Thursday in Washington, with rare earth flows sitting near the top of the agenda.

Greer calls it manufactured uncertainty

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer isn't buying that the slowdown is bureaucratic noise. "I think a lot of it is because China has created this uncertainty," Greer told Bloomberg Television Monday, after talks in New York with his Chinese counterparts. "They have limited rare earths exports. They control them, we monitor them, and I think just saying we have full confidence and trust with each other at this point is a little naive."

Greer gave China a "passing grade" on maintaining critical mineral flows back in May. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent struck a more skeptical tone in July, saying China should "fully meet its commitments." Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng held their own talks in New York ahead of the leaders' meeting.

China hasn't publicly confirmed it's deliberately choking supply, and licensing backlogs, environmental compliance checks, and normal export paperwork can slow shipments without any coordinated squeeze behind them. People familiar with the matter told Mining.com that Beijing actually hopes to offer more export licenses as a bargaining chip in the Thursday talks, which cuts against the idea of a calculated freeze-out. Bloomberg Economics' Chris Kennedy noted that periods of calm restoring cheap Chinese material "weaken the urgency for the US to break its dependence on China" in the first place, meaning Beijing has an incentive either way.

In June, China added MP Materials and USA Rare Earth, the two companies building America's domestic rare earth refining and magnet capacity, to its own export control list, according to the Daily Record. That move stands out as something you wouldn't expect from a supplier trying to prove good faith.

The International Energy Agency estimates that a full Chinese export cutoff could put $6.5 trillion in production outside China at risk annually, with the US and Europe absorbing nearly half that damage, the Daily Record reported. China currently refines 73% of the world's cobalt, 59% of its lithium and 90% of its graphite, according to the same reporting.

Antimony shows how this plays out in practice. China controls roughly 75% of world antimony refining. When Beijing restricted antimony exports in 2024 and 2025, prices surged almost 200%, driving up costs for the lead-acid batteries that start American military trucks, tanks and helicopters, even though the US recycles 99% of its lead domestically.

On rare earth refining specifically, new US and Malaysian capacity has chipped China's share down to 85%, from 90% in 2023. The Trump administration launched Project Vault in February, a strategic critical minerals reserve backed by a $10 billion Export-Import Bank loan and nearly $2 billion in private capital.

The 16-year hole nobody's filled

California's Mountain Pass mine led world rare earth production until the late 1980s, before radioactive wastewater spills into the Mojave Desert and cheaper Chinese output shut it down. The separation plant closed in 1998, the mine itself in 2002. MP Materials restarted mining there in 2017, but the US still imported more than two-thirds of the rare earths it used as recently as 2025, according to reporting republished by Yahoo News and Ars Technica from an analysis by a former US Navy war-game adjudicator.

The US Government Accountability Office estimated back in 2010 that rebuilding a full domestic supply chain, mining through magnet manufacturing, could take up to 15 years. It's now been 16.

A September 2026 Council on Foreign Relations report by Joris Teer argues that mine-and-refine subsidies alone won't fix this. Teer's report contends rare earths are just one of many Beijing-controlled industrial chokepoints spanning batteries, legacy semiconductors and niche chemicals, and calls for allied countries to align tariffs and procurement rules on the demand side while threatening to restrict China's access to allied markets and semiconductor technology as a deterrent.

Whether Thursday's meeting produces a short extension of the truce, as US negotiators have signaled, or something longer, the underlying imbalance doesn't change on its own. China still mined about 60% of the world's rare earths used in magnets and handled roughly 91% of separation and refining in 2024. No amount of summit diplomacy will change that.