Huge areas of China are already highly toxic because of the large scale lithium mining going on there. The entire nation is a huge ecological disaster zone, because unlike the US and many other nations they have no safeguards in place and have been destroying their environment in the pursuit of money.
Now lithium can be extracted without all that ecological damage, but that makes it very expensive. That is how it was done in the US, and why lithium was expensive. But China does not care about the environment, and destroys it while exploiting the resources.