China Says Trump’s Order on Seabed Mining Violates International Law

China’s foreign ministry said on Friday that an executive order President Trump signed a day earlier to accelerate the permitting process for seabed mining in international waters “violates international law and harms the overall interests of the international community.”

The BBC earlier reported the remarks by a foreign ministry spokesman, Guo Jiakun. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

With the notable exception of the United States, nearly every country in the world is party to a treaty on marine and maritime activities that went into force in 1994, called the Law of the Sea Convention. That the United States has never ratified the treaty is in part what allowed Mr. Trump to unilaterally decide that the government could issue permits for mining the seabed in areas beyond American territorial jurisdiction.

The White House has argued that extracting critical minerals such as cobalt and nickel from nodules on the ocean floor is crucial to its supply of metals that go into a plethora of advanced technologies.

Dozens of countries have called for a moratorium on seabed mining, and even those, like China, who have been keen to see seabed mining take place, have urged restraint until the International Seabed Authority, an agency created under the treaty, agrees on rules for how companies can go about extracting minerals from the deep sea.

Many scientists see deep-sea mining as environmentally risky. It has never been done at commercial scale before, and the deep sea is one of the planet’s least understood ecosystems.