The summit bought a year of time to combat China’s rare earth dominance. India is best positioned to take advantage.
By JIANLI YANG – Nov 6, 2025
The summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping at APEC in Gyeongju produced no grand bargain but one valuable by-product: time. China agreed to delay for one year the latest round of rare‐earth export controls, which Washington feared could strangle defense, clean-energy and semiconductor supply chains overnight. Markets cheeredwhat they saw as a “truce.” But the pause only underscores how precarious global dependence on China remains—and how urgently the world must diversify.
For the past decade, China has maintained a near-monopoly over the rare-earth elements that make the modern economy run. It controls roughly 70 percent of global mining, over 90 percent of refining, and almost the entire production of high-performance magnets essential to electric vehicles, wind turbines, and precision-guided munitions. Each time geopolitical tension spikes, Beijing’s ability to weaponize this dominance becomes obvious. Even a temporary export delay shakes entire industries from Detroit to Düsseldorf.
The one-year reprieve is therefore a window of opportunity—for the United States and its allies to act. The question is who can move fastest to build credible alternatives. Increasingly, that answer may be India.
New Delhi has long possessed the geological ingredients. India’s beach-sand deposits contain rich reserves of monazite, bastnaesite, and other rare-earth minerals, but the country’s processing capacity and environmental rules have lagged. That is now changing. In June, India announced that it is negotiating with companies and planning a fiscal incentive scheme for domestic rare-earth magnet manufacturing, aimed at reducing reliance on China… [Continue Reading]
Source: https://thediplomat.com/2025/11/indias-rare-earth-opportunity-after-the-trump-xi-summit/