Foreign agents have been using China’s postal system to smuggle rare earths.
In a statement posted on its social media account on Friday, the Ministry of State Security cited various tactics used by an unnamed country that it said could not produce its own rare metals and was stealing the minerals to shore up its own supplies.
The ministry said it had discovered that a foreign contractor had been shipping the restricted materials by packaging them with fake labels, falsifying the product names or sending the material through express delivery packages. It had also routed the packages through intermediary countries before sending them on to their final destinations, a method known as transhipping.