China added ten US companies to its export-control list on Monday, among them MP Materials and USA Rare Earth, the two rare-earth firms Washington has funded to build a supply chain free of China, the Commerce Ministry said.
The listing, issued as Announcement No. 23 of 2026, bars Chinese exporters from supplying dual-use goods to the named firms and bars anyone in any country from routing China-origin dual-use items to them, with shipments already under way to stop at once and exporters able to seek case-by-case approval, the ministry said. A separate Finance Ministry notice barred 46 US firms, most of them defence contractors, from Chinese government procurement, exempting US-funded enterprises operating in China.
The two notices answer the Pentagon’s expansion earlier this month of its list of “Chinese military companies,” which added Alibaba, Baidu, BYD and NIO. The Commerce Ministry said the measures responded to the “US government’s malicious practice” and served national security and non-proliferation obligations.
Analysts read the response as proportional and, on the firms’ US sales, largely symbolic, since the listed companies sell little or nothing into China. “Those companies are not going to do business in China, so the impact will be quite symbolic,” George Chen, partner for Greater China at the Asia Group, told Reuters, calling the action a “proportional response to the Department of War’s 1260H list,” the secondary name the US Defense Department adopted last year.
The measure restricts the reverse flow: what the listed firms can receive from China, and through the third-country rule what reaches them routed via other markets. Shanghai Metals Market, the Chinese commodity-data provider that reproduced the announcement, read the controls as symbolic for China’s own magnet exports while pressing on the US firms’ processing and construction schedules, pointing to USA Rare Earth’s Oklahoma magnet plant, whose build-out toward 2028 it described as dependent on Chinese material and process validation.
MP Materials runs the only active US rare-earth mine, at Mountain Pass, California, and counts the Pentagon as its largest shareholder after a roughly $400 million equity stake taken in 2025, about 15 percent of the company. USA Rare Earth, building US mine-to-magnet capacity, announced a $1.6 billion Commerce Department package in January, $277 million in federal funds and a $1.3 billion loan, that gives Washington an equity stake of its own. Shanghai Metals Market described Monday’s action as the first time China has placed US rare-earth firms on its export-control list, grouping them with drone, radar, robotics, aerospace and military-vehicle suppliers.
The South China Morning Post reported the measures arrived amid a broader stabilisation of US-China ties. They extend a sequence of Chinese controls staged since April 2025, when MOFCOM first restricted heavy rare earths, and tightened that October. Monday’s action is entity-specific, not a fresh restriction on rare-earth exports as a whole, and it lands inside a partial suspension of China’s stricter controls that runs to 10 November 2026.