China Starts Granting General Licenses for Rare Earths, EU Says

China has started granting licenses with lengthier terms to allow European companies to obtain critical minerals essential for industries including clean tech, automakers and defense contractors, the EU’s top trade official said.

“We are getting initial reports from our industry that they are getting these general licenses but we need to have a little bit more granular information to evaluate the whole process,” Maros Sefcovic, European Commission’s trade chief, Maros Sefcovic, told Bloomberg Television.

Officials in Brussels have argued that licenses valid for a year would help ease bottlenecks in an application process that has threatened to cripple ...