Buried in the reddish soil of southern China lies latent power: One of the largest clusters of crucial rare earths is mined around the clock by a secretive and heavily guarded industry.
The hills of Jiangxi province are home to most of China's rare earth mines, with the materials used in a wide range of products including smartphones and missile guidance technology.
The flourishing industry is closely protected by Chinese authorities and media access is seldom granted.
In a rare visit to the region last month, AFP journalists were trailed and monitored by minders who declined to identify themselves. Companies did not accept requests for interviews.
Business has been booming: The number of rare earth processing points in China observed by the U.S. Geological Survey jumped from 117 in 2010 to 2,057 by 2017. Most of the 3,085 nationwide recorded by the USGS today are clustered in the hills of Jiangxi.
Locals there told AFP that one rare earths mine was maintaining near-constant operations.
The bustling mining region is the result of a decades-long push by Beijing to build up its might in the strategic sector.
Those efforts paid off this year, with a tentative truce in a trade war with the U.S. reached when China relaxed stringent export controls on rare earths.
Washington is now racing to establish alternative supply chains, but experts warn such efforts will take years.
In a sign of deepening concern among other Western governments, the European Union announced new measures this month to reduce the bloc's dependence on China for securing the critical minerals.
The bloc said it would earmark nearly 3 billion euros ($3.5 billion) to support projects in mining, refining and recycling vital materials, and proposed the creation of an EU supply hub — the European Centre for Critical Raw Materials.
"The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths," former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said in a 1992 speech.
Since then, China has taken advantage of its natural reserves — the largest of any country — to dominate processing and innovation in the field.
The country's rare earths industry is concentrated in two main hubs.
One is the Inner Mongolia region's Bayan Obo mining district on the edge of the Gobi Desert, which is rich in "light" rare earths used for magnets in everyday items.
The other hub, around the city of Ganzhou in Jiangxi, specialises in "heavy" rare earths — harder to extract but more valuable because of their use in heat-resistant magnets, fighter jet engines, missile guidance systems and lasers.
The rugged hills surrounding Ganzhou are home to the world's largest mining and processing operations of the strategic "heavy" elements, including dysprosium, yttrium and terbium.
And in the county-level district of Longnan alone, USGS counted 886 such locations, accounting for 31.5 percent of Jiangxi's total.
