Toward sustainable mineral resource governance: policy implications of China’s 2024 Mineral Resources Law reform

China’s 2024 revision of the Mineral Resources Law seeks to integrate resource allocation, ecological governance, and strategic resource security within a single legal framework. This article examines the sustainability implications of the reform through an institutional-coupling framework that identifies how legal mechanisms link allocation, accountability, and resilience across the mining lifecycle. The study combines doctrinal and policy-oriented legal analysis with a purposively selected, document-based provincial case study of Guangxi and a functional comparison with the European Union and Australia. The analysis identifies contractual, financial, informational, administrative, participatory, and remedial mechanisms through which mineral-right allocation is linked to lifecycle ecological responsibility and strategic mineral governance. The findings indicate that mineral law can provide a legal and institutional basis for coordinating economic objectives, ecological responsibility, and long-term resource security. The analysis also identifies implementation risks, including gaps between formal compliance and ecological outcomes, as well as insufficient coordination of supply-security measures with environmental safeguards. By placing China’s reform in dialogue with research on the resource curse, just transition, lifecycle governance, and critical minerals, the article contributes a mechanism-based account of legal integration. Its conclusions remain limited to legal design and early administrative implementation.