The Race for Rare Earths

This is an urgent wake-up call.

Every iPhone, electric vehicle, AI data center, smart missile and countless other tech essentials rely on rare earth metals. Today, China controls up to 97% of the refined materials and is actively weaponizing that monopoly against the West.

In The Race for Rare Earths, Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times Beijing Bureau Chief Keith Bradsher delivers an urgent, front-lines account of how China carefully engineered this chokehold, and how other nations’ missteps enabled them to dominate rare earths.

Reporting directly from mainland China, Bradsher takes readers from standoffs with illegal mining syndicates to high-stakes trade wars in Washington and Beijing, where export bans are quietly crippling Western industry.

Featuring explosive, previously unreleased reporting on how Western governments failed to stockpile these critical minerals, Bradsher exposes the devastating impact of recent embargoes and lays out a sobering, urgent roadmap for how the world must act before the chokehold tightens permanently.