Ganzhou
The 'Rare Earth Kingdom' controls 80% of China's heavy rare earth deposits — remove Ganzhou from the supply chain and the EV, defence, and renewables industries restructure around scarcity.
Every smartphone, electric vehicle battery, and wind turbine on Earth depends on materials that flow disproportionately through Ganzhou. The 'Rare Earth Kingdom' sits on 80% of China's ion-adsorption rare earth deposits — the heavy rare earths that are hardest to substitute and most critical for advanced manufacturing. Jiangxi province also produces over a third of China's tungsten, and Ganzhou is the processing hub.
The city of nearly 9 million people (95% Hakka ethnicity) has leveraged this geological accident into geopolitical leverage. When China restricts rare earth exports — as it has done repeatedly during trade disputes with Japan, the US, and the EU — Ganzhou's processing facilities become the chokepoint. The deposits are ion-adsorption clays, a form found almost nowhere else on Earth, extractable only through techniques Chinese firms have spent decades refining.
Ganzhou controls 80% of China's heavy rare earth deposits — the materials most critical for advanced tech and hardest to find anywhere else on Earth.
This is keystone-species dynamics at industrial scale. Remove Ganzhou's rare earth processing from the global supply chain and the downstream effects ripple through electric vehicles, military hardware, consumer electronics, and renewable energy. No other single city creates this degree of technological dependency.
The vulnerability is environmental. Ion-adsorption rare earth extraction has historically caused severe soil degradation and water pollution across southern Jiangxi. China has been consolidating the industry and imposing environmental standards, but decades of artisanal mining have left contamination that will take generations to remediate. The resource that gives Ganzhou its leverage is also destroying the landscape beneath it.
Ganzhou's population is overwhelmingly Hakka — a Han Chinese subgroup whose name literally means 'guest families,' reflecting centuries of internal migration. The Hakka built the walled fortress villages (tulou) that dot Jiangxi and Fujian, structures designed to protect communities in hostile territory. Ganzhou's current position mirrors this pattern: a valuable resource held behind defensive walls of processing expertise and geological monopoly.