Rare earth metals were an afterthought for most world leaders until China temporarily suspended most exports of them a couple of months ago.

直到几个月前中国暂时停止了大部分稀土出口，大多数世界领导人才惊觉这一资源的价值。

But for almost half a century, they have received attention from the very top of the Chinese government.

但在近半个世纪的时间里，稀土一直受到中国政府最高层的关注。

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.

在毛泽东统治中国的27年间，他往往重视的是提高中国的钢铁产量，却很少关注其质量。结果是生产了大量质量低劣的钢铁，无法满足工业需求。

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.

20世纪40年代末，英国和美国的冶金学家研发出了一种技术含量相当低的方法来提高球墨铸铁的质量，这种材料广泛用于管道、汽车零件和其他产品。个中秘诀何在？在金属仍处于熔融状态时加入少量的稀土元素铈。这是稀土金属在工业上的早期应用之一。而且与大多数稀土金属不同的是，铈从矿石中进行化学分离相对容易。

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.

1978年成为中国的最高领导人后，邓小平迅速着手整顿钢铁工业。他任命了技术专家型官员方毅担任副总理，并兼任掌握重权的国家科学技术委员会主任。

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.

方毅立即带领中国最好的地质学家和科学家前往包头，这座位于内蒙古的城市不仅拥有巨大的钢铁厂，附近还有全国最大的铁矿。在毛泽东时代，包头为中国的坦克和大炮生产了大量钢铁，但方毅团队做出了一项重要决定，不仅要从这座矿提取铁，还要提取其他矿物质。

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.

这座城市的铁矿石矿床中富含大量的所谓轻稀土。除了用于球墨铸铁和玻璃制造的铈，还包括石油精炼所需的镧。

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.

矿床中还蕴藏着钐等中稀土。美国在70年代已将其用于制造超音速战机和导弹电机必需的耐高温磁体。

“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.

在包头博物馆陈列的文献中可以看到，方毅在1978年视察包头时曾断言，“稀土在钢、球墨铸铁、玻璃陶瓷、军工、电子和新材料等方面有重要的应用价值。”

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.

当时正值中美关系改善。方毅结束包头考察后不久，带领中国的顶尖工程师团队造访美国最先进的工厂，包括洛克希德·马丁公司和麦道飞机在洛杉矶附近的组装厂。

北京中国科学院地质与地球物理研究所博物馆陈列的白云鄂博矿稀土矿物标本，摄于2025年5月。

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.

自然界中稀土金属紧密共生，尤其是重稀土元素的萃取分离需经多道化学工序，并消耗大量的酸。

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.

在上世纪50、60年代，美国和苏联都研发出了类似的分离工艺。但技术成本高昂，不仅需配置不锈钢分离槽及管道系统，更依赖昂贵的硝酸制剂。

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.

曾在北美几家最大的稀土企业担任CEO的化学工程师康斯坦丁·卡拉扬诺普洛斯透露，中国政府当时指令科研机构研发低成本方案。中国工程师找到了使用廉价塑料和盐酸分离稀土的工艺。

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.

凭借成本优势与宽松的环境监管，中国的稀土精炼厂实现了对西方竞争对手的价格碾压。面对日益严格的环境法规，西方的精炼厂几乎全部关停。

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.

与此同时，中国的地质学家发现，他们的国家拥有全球近一半的稀土储量，包括中南部地区丰富的重稀土资源，这种资源对用于汽车、医疗成像及其他领域的磁体都极具价值。

江西的一处稀土矿作业现场，摄于2012年3月。

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.

20世纪90年代至新世纪初，中国的精炼工程师成功攻克了重稀土分离技术。这使得中国在重稀土生产上几乎形成了完全垄断。

“The Middle East has oil,” Mr. Deng said in 1992. “China has rare earths.”

邓小平在1992年曾表示，“中东有石油，中国有稀土。”

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.

那时，他和方毅早已经培养出下一位将引领中国稀土产业发展的领导人——一位名叫温家宝的地质学家。上世纪60年代末，温家宝在北京地质学院获得了稀土科学的硕士学位，当时中国大部分地区正因文化大革命的动荡而陷入瘫痪。

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.

温家宝于1998年出任副总理，2003年至2013年担任总理。在2010年访欧期间，他宣称，中国的稀土政策几乎无一不是在他的直接参与下制定的。