Securing supplies of key industrial commodities under de facto Chinese sovereignty may be worth the cost of whatever subsidies are required to encourage entrepreneurs & investors.
It’s very hard for anyone, even the US/UN, to sanction Chinese companies that only seek to import ocean materials into the Chinese domestic market.
What?!? Must we find any reason possible to knock the west?
The line being drawn is “we’ve messed up a bunch of ecosystems over the years mining on land, let’s not make the same mess in this new frontier.”
Simple line. Let’s not open yet another ecosystem up to mining. It hasn’t gone well for the others.
That would only make sense if we sanctioned every other country for opening/expanding land mines, but that's not a practical proposal. Otherwise the justification seems awfully flimsy and arbitrary. Why is it not okay to disrupt deep sea ecosystems, but it's fine to disrupt land based ecosystems? Is the logic is that because Rhinos (or whatever other land animals) are already endangered, it's fine to drive them further into extinction?