China’s 0.1 Per Cent Rule Returns in November — and It Reaches Magnets Made Outside China

Written 27 August 2026. This is a fast-moving regulatory position — confirm the suspension status before relying on anything here commercially.

China’s rare earth export control framework now runs across three separate announcements, and the one that matters most for anyone buying motors or magnets is currently suspended rather than repealed.

• •Announcement 18 (April 2025) controls rare earth materials and magnets themselves. It is in force and has never been suspended. Magnets containing controlled heavy rare earths — principally dysprosium and terbium — are treated as dual-use items requiring a Chinese export licence.
• •Announcement 61 (9 October 2025) extends control extraterritorially through a de minimis rule. It is suspended until 10 November 2026.
• •Announcement 62 controls the underlying technology and know-how. Also suspended to the same date.

Announcement 61 provides that a product manufactured entirely outside China can fall within Chinese export controls if Chinese-origin rare earth content reaches 0.1 per cent by value of the total product. Reporting indicates the trigger is assessed at component level rather than at the finished-product level.

That is the crux for the EV supply chain. A traction motor assembly is exactly the kind of product where the rule bites, and a data-centre component is exactly the kind where it does not.

A case surfaced in May 2026 in which a listed Chinese manufacturer was fined roughly RMB 910,000 — several times the cargo value — after customs tested a shipment declared as ordinary NdFeB and found 1.2 per cent dysprosium.

The lesson is narrower than “magnets are restricted”. It is that a declared grade is not evidence of composition, and customs is testing.

The practical exposure is not that magnets are banned; they are not. It is sourcing from a supplier who cannot prove by testing what is actually inside the magnet.

• •Ask for compositional test data on heavy rare earth content, not a grade name on a datasheet. A grade code encodes an energy product and a temperature rating; it does not certify a dysprosium percentage.
• •Understand the licence status of what you are importing, including whether any upstream input was Chinese-origin. Under Announcement 61 the question is not where the magnet was pressed.
• •Treat 10 November 2026 as a live date. If no further suspension is announced, Announcements 61 and 62 reimpose simultaneously.
• •Note that Announcement 18 applies now regardless. The April regime is the permanent baseline; the November date concerns the extraterritorial extension on top of it.

Reporting through the first half of 2026 describes steep increases in neodymium-praseodymium oxide, with heavy rare earths under particular pressure because commercially scaled refined supply outside China is effectively absent.

Several analyses put the Chinese share of global rare earth refining and separation capacity above 90 per cent, and note that this reflects control of the processing stage rather than of reserves — China holds only around a third of global reserves.

That distinction is the whole story, and it is why India’s magnet scheme deliberately funds oxide-to-metal conversion rather than magnet pressing alone. The mechanics of why separation is so hard to replicate are in our chapter on the separation cascade.