China is planning to further crack down on illegal rare earth mining and smelting companies by establishing a blacklist, State media reported on Wednesday.

Citing anonymous sources from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Economic Information, a newspaper affiliated with Xinhua News Agency, reported that the key inspection area will not only include the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, Jiangxi and Guangdong provinces, where rare earth companies concentrated, but also rare earth trading companies in Beijing and Shanghai.

China has been cracking down on illegal players in the field for years but many small companies still swarm into the industry lured by the prospect of high profits.