Sometimes people are assigned progressive by social expectations and start playing that role without really thinking about it. She tried to write an apolitical generic kids book, and everybody’s white, fat people are evil, and bankers are big nosed goblins. Then other people read it and started pointing things out, but she couldn’t detect any of this herself so when she tried to be inclusive she just added Ching Chong the asian and a minstrel slave race. Need to make someone black, I said Hermione has ugly frizzy hair so I guess it’s her. Need a gay, make it the asexual grandpa so it’s not gross. Eventually something comes along that cracks their assumption that they must be progressive and they come out as right wing on Twitter.
It was authorized last time with Chang’e 5. The problem is it’s not just getting a signature, the bureaucracy takes months and China wants to hand out samples quickly, so last time the US had scientists fill out the application to get rocks before they were authorized to work with them, which risked China wasting time on dead-end applications and having to do even more work to re-assign those samples to someone else if it wasn’t authorized.
China will probably allow US scientists to do that again, but this only works because China agrees to put up with it. They can put a “this research is currently legal” check box on the application and Americans won’t be able to check it until after the deadline.