After Japan excavated rare earth elements from the seabed, Japanese media asked the Chinese side how they viewed it, and the spokesperson's one sentence won a round of applause!

On February 1st, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology announced that its deep-sea research vessel "Earth" successfully collected sediment rich in rare earth elements at a depth of about 5,600 meters near the Ogasawara Islands. This news was quickly widely reported by mainstream Japanese media, even describing it as a "major breakthrough that may change the global resource landscape."

Subsequently, on February 3rd, during a regular press conference, a Japanese journalist asked on the spot: "What is China's comment on this?" Unexpectedly, the Chinese side only gave a short reply: "We have noticed that there have been such reports in Japan in recent years." Gao Ge really wants to applaud this sentence.

Japan's research on rare earths in the seabed is not something new. Since 2013, the University of Tokyo and JAMSTEC jointly published a paper indicating that the seabed mud around the Ogasawara Islands has an extremely high content of rare earth oxides, with some areas even exceeding China's land deposits. Since then, over the past decade and a half, the Japanese government has continuously invested funds to support related exploration and mining technology development, with "new progress" being reported almost every year. However, these "discoveries" have remained at the laboratory or small-scale trial stage and have never achieved commercial mining.

In fact, Vietnam, Brazil, the United States, Australia, and other places also have considerable reserves — but because China has the most complete and cost-effective refining and separation industry chain in the world. Natural rare earth ores usually have complex compositions and must go through complicated processes of ore selection, separation, and purification before they can be converted into usable materials. China's long-term dominance of the global rare earth supply chain is not because it has the largest absolute reserves — according to data from the US Geological Survey (USGS), as of 2025, more than 90% of the world's rare earth refining capacity is still concentrated in China.

Original article: toutiao.com/article/1856091337916428/

Statement: This article represents the personal views of the author.