The National Minerals Information Center (NMIC) of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) reports annual statistics for mineral commodities in about 180 countries and compiles information on the world’s mineral facilities. To understand the spatial characteristics of the worldwide mineral commodity supply chains, the NMIC has compiled geographic information system (GIS) geodatabases for the mineral industries and related infrastructure of Latin America and the Caribbean (Baker and other, 2017), Africa (Padilla and others, 2021), countries in Southwest Asia (Padilla and others, 2022) and in the Indo-Pacific (Trimmer and others, 2024), and China (Neustaedter and others, 2023).

The USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries (MCS) by the NMIC have provided the latest annual production and (or) reserves of 77 individual minerals by country. In 2023, China continued to be the dominant global mineral producer. Of 77 mineral commodities, China produced 74, and it was the world’s leading producer for 39 (including 25 metals and 14 industrial minerals) (table 1; U.S. Geological Survey, 2025b). The geodatabase for China, with updated information on major mines and mineral processing plants using Moon (2026), provides a dataset for a total of 932 mines and quarries (including oil and gas fields) and 1,506 mineral processing plants. These numbers reflected counting a facility more than once for producing multiple commodities; for example, if a mine produces copper and gold, the mine was listed under both copper and gold (table 2; Neustaedter and others, 2023).

Considering the importance of China’s mineral industry to the global economy, this study reviewed the significance of China’s mineral production and summarized the country’s major mineral facilities as of 2023. To provide non-GIS users with insights into the spatial distribution of mineral facilities (including oil and gas) and ports for trade, this study also created a geospatial (also called “georeferenced”) portable document format (GeoPDF) map using the GIS-based geodatabase by Neustaedter and others (2023). The GeoPDF also contains mineral resource tracts (such as antimony, copper, potash, coal, and oil and gas), mineral exploration sites, and energy infrastructure. This effort reflects USGS’s ongoing mission of analyzing the contribution of an individual country to the mineral industry and global commodity supply chains and providing the spatial distribution of global mineral resources and mineral facilities.

China’s economic growth in the past two decades, driven largely by investment in manufacturing and exports of goods, resulted in large increases in China’s production of, and demand for, mineral commodities (Xun, 2022; Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China, 2024). As a result, China had become the world’s leading producer and consumer of numerous mineral commodities. Beginning with the economic slowdown that started late 2012, the country’s economic development had been, and was continuing to be, increasingly consumption driven (International Monetary Fund, 2025). China’s manufacturing sector, however, still accounted for about 25 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2024 (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2025b), which is notably higher than the percentage for the world’s major economies by GDP, such as Germany and Japan (19 percent each), India (13 percent), and the United States (11 percent) in 2023 (Our World in Data, 2025).

After the implementation of the National Mineral Resources Plan (2008 to 2015) of China, the domestic reserves of major metal minerals, such as copper-gold, lead-zinc, molybdenum, and tungsten, have continued to increase. The outputs of minerals have substantially increased as well (National Development and Reform Commission of the People’s Republic of China, 2017). The large and growing industrial base was helping keep downstream demand strong and supporting the mineral industry’s move to expand capacity. The mineral industry (except for oil and gas extraction) has nonetheless been faced with some challenges, such as underutilization of production capacity, slow growth in demand, depletion of high-quality resources, and stricter environmental regulations (Xun, 2022; Moon, 2026).

In 2024, China’s capacity utilization rate of the smelting and pressing of nonferrous metals was 79 percent; the smelting and pressing of ferrous metals, 78 percent; the mining industry, 75 percent; and the manufacturing of nonmetallic mineral products, 62 percent (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2025a). These low utilization rates indicate the existence of overcapacity relative to domestic and global demands. It also implies that these facilities operating at low utilization rates could ramp up production to full capacity in the short term and export excess output to oversupply the global market, driving down global prices and undermining sustainability of foreign competitors (Alonso and others, 2025). For example, more than 800 million metric tons per year (Mt/yr) of raw steel capacity came online in China between 2000 and 2015. The production by China has been about equal to or greater than the total of the rest of the world since 2013. The overstock by China resulted in record low steel prices and consequently led to the decreased utilization rates of foreign steelmakers (Shambaugh, 2024).

Table 5 shows China’s largest (up to the top 4) mineral facility operators by annual production capacity and location (latitude and longitude) for which China was the world’s leading producer for mineral commodities in the mining and processing stages as of 2023. Namely, China was the world’s leading alumina and aluminum producer and the world’s third bauxite producer. Table 5 shows the locations of major bauxite mines, alumina refineries, and aluminum smelters, providing data for future analyses of spatial proximity of these facilities and mapping domestic logistics and supply chains. Commonly, a mine and a smelter (or a refinery) may produce multiple metals during the mining and processing of ore concentrates. For example, gold is produced as a coproduct with copper mine production; gallium, as a byproduct from bauxite and zinc; and indium, as a byproduct from zinc concentrate (Nassar and Fortier, 2021). The data of these mineral facilities were collected and reproduced from USGS publications (Neustaedter and others, 2023; Moon, 2026).

As shown in table 5, Yunnan is one of the country’s major mineral industry provinces by the number of major mineral facilities. The province held the country’s major mines of bauxite, lead-zinc, phosphate rock, and tin, and processing plants of lead and tin. Other provinces with major mineral facilities include Henan, Hunan, Jiangxi, Shandong, and Sichuan. For rare earths, Nei Mongol is the province with the country’s largest mine and smelter.

One of the goals of this study is to create a GeoPDF of the geodatabase from Neustaedter and others (2023) with updated major mineral facilities using Moon (2026). Updated feature attributes in the mineral facilities feature class from the original geodatabase included annual production capacity, capacity notes, commodity, facility name, major operating company, and (or) operating status as well as the addition of 21 new entries. The GeoPDF map presents data on mineral facilities, exploration sites, and permissive tracts for mineral resource assessment of antimony, coal, copper, phosphate, and potash. The permissive tracts refer to the geologic environments of formation that were described in the deposit model; that is, the tracts will contain all the undiscovered deposits postulated in the assessment. Base cartographic elements from Natural Earth (2025) were also incorporated on the GeoPDF map to represent political and physical features in the study area and to aid in visual interpretation.

Figure 1 presents a screenshot of the GeoPDF map showing the locations of zinc mines and smelters (mineral processing plants), of which the major facilities were listed in table 5. Zinc is classified as critical by the United States and is a host commodity of other critical minerals, such as gallium, germanium, indium, and tellurium (U.S. Geological Survey, 2025a).

Table 6 summarizes the feature datasets organized as folders in the GeoPDF, which contain individual selectable map layers, and lists the subset of feature attributes that are viewable on the map. The updated mineral facilities feature class contains the location of 932 mines and quarries and 1,506 processing plants across China (table 2). To aid in the visual interpretation of the mineral facilities feature class, it was divided by commodity into separate map layers, which were grouped into subfolders in the mineral facilities feature dataset called “Critical Minerals” of the United States and “Other Fuel and Nonfuel Minerals” (see “Layers” on GeoPDF map). Additionally, the electric power generating facilities feature class was divided by capacity classification into separate map layers to aid in visual interpretation. All other feature classes from the original geodatabase were included on the GeoPDF map as a single layer. The original full dataset as well as comprehensive metadata containing detailed definitions for all user-defined attribute data and documentation of all data sources are available via the accompanying USGS data release (Neustaedter and others, 2023). Instructions on how to view the layers and attribute data are included on the GeoPDF map. Additional information and instructions for navigating the layers of the GeoPDF map as well as accessing the attribute data can be found in Baker and others (2017) and TerraGo Technologies Inc. (2025a, b).