China’s recent tightening of export controls over rare earths and dual-use metals is not merely a trade policy: it is the culmination of seventy-plus years of systematic exploitation of Tibet’s rich natural wealth — extraction carried out with minimal consent, maximal environmental destruction, and growing urgency to weaponize those resources for state power.
From Exploitation to Hoarding
China dominates rare earth mining, processing, and magnet production globally. The newly announced export controls — which require licenses for equipment, finished products, magnet components, and dual-use technologies, and explicitly block many defence users — make clear that Beijing now intends not just to profit from global demand, but to monopolize the supply for its own political, military and strategic ends.
This shift exposes a long-standing practice: for decades, minerals extracted from Tibet — copper, gold, rare earths, uranium, lithium, and others — have flowed into state-owned enterprises and been exported or used largely outside the Tibetan community. The state has reaped most benefits; local Tibetans have borne the costs.
Tibet: Systematic Exploitation, Ecological Collapse
Lack of Autonomy & Displacement
- Little input, little say. Tibetan communities are almost never meaningfully consulted or involved in decision-making over mining projects on their lands. Projects are approved via provincial, county or township CCP authorities without transparent processes respecting indigenous rights.
- Displacement and restructuring. Nomadic groups and pastoral communities have been forced from ancestral grazing lands. In many cases this has been done under the guise of ecological protection, but is tied to making land available for mining, infrastructure and non-Tibetan settlement. The loss of land undermines traditional livelihoods and radically alters social structure.
Environmental Destruction
- Water, soil, and ecosystem damage. Mining in Tibet often involves poor tailings management, heavy-metal runoff, river and watershed contamination. Waters used by Tibetans for livestock and drinking become polluted; agricultural land is degraded.
- Fragile high-altitude ecosystems torn apart. The Tibetan Plateau has unique ecological sensitivity. Stripped hillsides, worsening landslides, erosion of grasslands, loss of vegetation cover, habitat destruction — all consequences of mining operations approved by Chinese authorities.
- Long-term health and intergenerational costs. Human rights law frameworks recognise that damage to water, land, and livelihoods in Tibet likely affects health, food security and intergenerational rights. Clean-up cost is often borne by local people (or simply ignored), while major profits flow elsewhere.
Hypocrisy & Militarisation
China’s recent export controls make explicit what many Tibetans, observers and analysts have long suspected:
- Hypocrite in global supply chains. While China has for decades supplied much of the world with rare earths extracted in Tibet and elsewhere, under conditions often violating environmental, social, and human rights, it now turns to deny similar access to foreign industries, especially those with defence or dual-use capabilities. That is a stark reversal: selling stolen wealth abroad, then hoarding it for militarisation.
- Weapons & strategic leverage. Rare earths and critical minerals are essential to aerospace, semiconductors, precision weapons, and electronics. China’s restriction of exports — particularly to defense end-users and for sensitive technologies — is clearly aimed at ensuring its own military edge, while diminishing others’.
- National security as cover. The language of “national security,” “dual-use” and “defence licence refusal” conceals the continuity of decades of extraction that impoverished local communities, destroyed ecosystems, and enriched CCP state-actors and elites. What is being defended now is precisely the infrastructure, technology, and resource bases built by the same party that extracted them from Tibet under coercive conditions.
Evidence & Sources
- Tibet Justice Center reports that Tibet holds “very rich mineral resources,” including large shares of China’s supply of iron, copper, lithium, gold, bauxite, uranium etc., and that these are extracted in ways that violate Tibetans’ right to self-determined development.
- Free Tibet / Tibet Watch have documented ecological disasters, landslides, soil erosion, damage to waterways and destruction of vegetation caused by mining in Tibetan villages, and that residents’ complaints are routinely ignored.
- Radio Free Asia, environmental researchers note illegal or semi-legal coal and mineral mining in Tibetan areas (including hydrological reserves and grazing lands), with consequences for water quality, pasture loss, and loss of livelihood.
Stakes & What Should Happen
- The newly tightened export rules are not just about trade policy: they are about ensuring that rare earths, many extracted under severely compromised ethical and environmental conditions in Tibet, are now reserved for Chinese state, military, and strategic industry.
- The global community — governments, companies, NGOs — must scrutinise supply chains back to source: where exactly rare earths come from, under what conditions, who pays the environmental cost, and who benefits.
- Tibetans must have rights to free, prior and informed consent over projects on their land; environmental degradation must be independently monitored; compensation and remediation must be mandated; autonomy over resource governance needs to be respected.
- Countries dependent on Chinese rare earths need to diversify sources, but also ensure ethical standards, not simply substitute environmentally destructive mining elsewhere.
Conclusion
For 76 years and counting, CCP policy has treated Tibet as a colonial resource base — a place to extract gold, copper, lithium, rare earths, uranium, with little regard for the health, environment, or social rights of its people. The recent export controls are not a break with that pattern — they are its logical next phase: from exploitation to exclusion to militarised hoarding. What China calls “export control” is in many ways a confession of how deeply its power depends on that history of plunder.
