China's rare earths exact a heavy price

NANNING, China - The villagers came out in flip-flops and straw hats, bearing white banners with handwritten characters that read: "Return the land to me."

They were farmers from Yulin in the southern province of Guangxi, where a state-owned enterprise was about to pour acids into large pits in the soil to extract one of China's key resources: rare earth.

Rare earth is a group of 17 elements, sometimes found in minerals containing uranium, that are critical to high-tech products including smartphones, wind turbines, electric cars and military equipment such as missile systems.

They are called "rare" not because they are necessarily hard to find, but because the extraction process is expensive and toxic. In the last two decades, China has come to dominate global rare-earth production by investing in mining and processing without enforcing adequate environmental safeguards.

By turning a blind eye to the environmental and human costs, major manufacturers have helped support China's expansion while reaping financial benefits because of the relatively