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The MIIT draft is a discretion-standards table (裁量权基准表) — a document type Chinese regulators use to bound the discretion of front-line inspectors when applying the headline penalty articles of an underlying State Council regulation. Here the underlying instrument is the Rare Earth Management Regulation (State Council Order No. 785, promulgated 22 June 2024, in force 1 October 2024), which made rare earths a state strategic resource and gave MIIT primary administrative jurisdiction over the upstream + midstream value chain (mining, smelting, separation, comprehensive utilisation). The 28 July 2025 MIIT Order No. 71 (Provisional Measures for Total Volume Control of Rare Earth Mining and Smelting-Separation) installed the quota mechanism. This April 2026 discretion-standards draft is the third implementing layer: it tells inspectors how hard to hit specific violations.
Tiered fines schedule (per third-party reporting on the draft text; canonical penalty figures still need to be cross-checked against the draft annex once the table itself becomes downloadable from MIIT):
on the MIIT national traceability platform at retracing.miit.gov.cn): fine up to 10× illegal gains, plus possible licence revocation or forced shutdown. This is the heaviest tier and reflects how central end-to-end traceability is to the post-Oct-2024 regime.
comprehensive utilisation → sales**, plus inputs imported under the expanded Oct-2025 extraterritorial controls (per SCMP).
governance was concentrated in MOFCOM export licences (the 2023-07-03 Ga/Ge, 2023-10-20 graphite, 2024-12-03 Ga/Ge/Sb US ban, 2025-02-04 W/Te/Bi/Mo/In, 2025-04-04 heavy-REE, 2025-10-09 extraterritorial REE, 2025-10-26 Announcement 68 W/Sb/Ag quotas). MIIT's penalty schedule is the upstream/midstream counterpart: it disciplines the producers themselves, not just the exporters. The result is full-spectrum "production + traceability + export" control architecture.
the post-2024 quota regime (Order No. 71) will actually bite — prior quotas were treated as soft guidance. This raises the probability that announced quota cuts translate into real output cuts at the smelter level.
reporting infrastructure is non-trivial; the 10× penalty tier effectively forces consolidation toward the six legacy state-owned REE groups (China Northern, China Southern, Chinalco, etc.).
domestic supply discipline — even a draft — supports MP Materials, Lynas, USA Rare Earth, Ucore Rare Metals NdPr/HREE pricing power.
list pointedly excluded neodymium and praseodymium. The MIIT domestic-penalty schedule by contrast covers all rare earths under the RMR — no Nd/Pr carve-out. This is the first formal Chinese instrument to put Nd/Pr inside an enforcement perimeter.
days from close to gazetting. Track for finalised version.
them after industry consultation?
Provisional Measures (Order No. 71) — i.e., a second penalty layer specifically for over-quota smelting?
(Supply Chain Security) and 2026-04-13 Order 835 (extraterritorial jurisdiction) — does MIIT enforcement reach foreign-incorporated joint ventures processing Chinese-origin rare-earth inputs?
Regulation (Order No. 785) is not yet filed in MacroLens. Worth queueing as a separate parent entry; this MIIT penalty draft would then responds_to it.