Abstract:Strategic and critical minerals are a type of resource that is essential to the country's economic development, indispensable to strategic emerging industries, and closely related to geopolitics. The types of strategic and critical minerals show some laws of spatial-temporal evolution due to the different stages of national economic development, economic structure and global industrial division of labor. Especially since the new century, with the rapid development of strategic emerging industries such as information technology, artificial intelligence and renewable energy, the connotation of strategic critical minerals has been continuously extended and closely connected with the industrial chain, highlighting its important position and security significance. China, the United States and the European Union have a high degree of overlap in the types of strategic critical minerals, and the United States and other Western countries are trying to build a critical mineral supply chain independent of China. Hence, it requires China to formulate relevant strategies and make scientific and reasonable responses.