Chinese
mineral investments have attracted increasing attention in recent years,
especially as China’s critical minerals dominance has become a central issue in
the West in the aftermath of the trade war first launched by Washington in 2018
and escalated in 2025. Despite that scrutiny, however, we still know relatively
little about China’s mining investments around the world. Using multiple
original datasets—including one that thoroughly documents 184 active
Chinese-owned mining properties outside China and another that covers more than
5,000 Chinese mining firms—along with dozens of interviews carried out in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo and China between 2016 and 2024, these two
papers shed light on multiple underexplored aspects of Chinese mining sector
investments globally. Together, they explore which firms are carrying out
mining investments, where they are investing and in pursuit of which
commodities, how they are investing, and what channels the Chinese government
can use to control them.