A lithium battery high-tech industrial park is seen in Hongshe, Southwest China’s Sichuan Province on August 29, 2022. The park hosts 35 companies in the industry and 49 projects, making it the largest such production base in Sichuan and Southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality. Companies said that the recent heat has had only a limited impact on operations. Photo: cnsphoto

 
China has sent officials to Yichun, a city in East China's Jiangxi Province that is rich in lithium resources, to investigate and supervise the local mining sector, after reports said that local people were crazily extracting "white stone", an alternative name for lepidolite, to sell amid a boom in China's new-energy vehicle (NEV) industry, a report by domestic news portal yicai.com said. 

The report cited government officials in Yichun as saying that China sent working groups to the city in the past week to investigate the local lithium mining situation, including officials from the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Natural Resources. 

China might send other departments' officials to the city to supervise lithium mining companies' mining and production, the report said. 

The city government of Yichun announced on Friday that would crack down on crimes involving the lithium battery and new-energy industries.

Chinese financial magazine Caijing published an article on the chaos of Yichun's lithium mining, which attracted a lot of public attention.

According to the report, certain village people in Yichun were obsessed with digging up lepidolite ore in local mining areas, mountains and woods to sell, as surging orders for NEVs in China in recent years have boosted demand and prices of lithium batteries and in turn, the raw materials of lithium.

The price of lithium carbonate, for example, surged from less than 100,000 yuan ($14,380) per ton in 2021 to about 590,000 yuan per ton in November 2022, data from bulk commodity service provider Mysteel showed.

According to the Caijing report, some Yichun villagers could make up to 1,000 yuan a day by digging up lepidolite ore. In comparison, rural residents of Yichun earned less than 1,600 yuan per month per capita in 2021.

The disorderly extraction caused chaos, including environmental damage and exploitation without a license. Several truck accidents have happened in certain mining areas of Yichun recently, as the large-scale operation of transport vehicles by lithium companies has affected transportation, the yicai.com report said.

According to media reports, violations like illegal mining, continued extracting after licenses expire and secret mining are likely to be the focus of the rectification campaign. 

In December, several listed companies including Yongxing Materials announced that their lithium battery companies in Yichun had suspended production after reports that nearby water areas exceeded the normal quality standard for thallium.

Often dubbed Asia's "lithium capital", Yichun has a large amount of lithium resources. According to local officials' investigation, the city and its subordinate jurisdictions had about 40 percent of China's total reserves of lepidolite, which can produce about 9 million tons of lithium oxide and can theoretically equip 600 million electric cars.