They’re called rare earths by they’re not rare.

Most of them are as common in the earth’s crust as copper or nickel. Large deposits exist in the US, Australia, Brazil.
In 1992, Deng Xiaoping visited a mine in Inner Mongolia and said “the Middle East has oil, China has rare earths”
3 years later, General Motors sold the only US company making magnets for American missiles. The buyer looked American, an investment group headed by the son of the Watergate prosecutor. But behind it was 2 Chinese state owned firms, both run by sons in law of Deng Xiaoping.
The US government approved it. The only condition was to keep the jobs and equipment for 10 years.
They waited, then disassembled the Indiana factories, put the equipment on pallets, and shipped it to Tianjin. By 2004 every plant in the US was gone.
China now controls 90% of global rare earth refining because they built the processing infrastructure while the West let its own close.
America’s only rare earth mine eventually reopened. But for years it mined ore and shipped it to China to be turned into something usable because there was nowhere else to do it.