I dunno Lore, I'm still not convinced on any particular pacing of the inevitable events.
To me, this is about the only manned mission that even makes sense, not just for Rus/China, but for any manned space flight. The Russians have been sitting in LEO trying to look busy and productive for longer than even we have; Mars is dumb, because the transit time is too high so you can't really adjust to conditions as they present; but the moon... You can have an offworld base, in a gravity well, that is not expensive to lift from, accomplish something that is actually useful, take advantage of the moon's pure vacuum environment for research (science or engineering)... Heck, getting stuff up on the moon is like storing delta-v; there's enough gravity to make working on stuff, building stuff easier; who knows how big a structure you could assemble in the low G environment and safely lift to moon orbit, dock it booster, accumulate fuel stores, deorbit, earth grav assist, and you got a big axx structure zipping through space with enough fuel to enter orbit somewhere else.
Of course, I'm a huge proponent of ditching the whole "go and safely return" mantra our dweebs chant. Once we'd spent enough time in LEO, and did our moon landing, we should have immediately changed our mission statements. "Go safely, stay and build."
I'd bet you could easily scrape up enough 50-something science guys (whose kids are grown) who'd say, "yep", to a [go, stay, and build] moon mission. (Mars still seems crazy unrealistic to me) Just keep the arthritis, statins, and bp meds flowing on the supply ships and you should be able to get a good 20+ years of work out of a human up there; and age and post reproductive status would moot most radiation exposure risks. Low G and the restrained attitudes of maturity should more than compensate for physical strength requirements.
Carry on!
nb.. I wouldn't think of the He3 as commercial, but rather a research material that can be collected that helps justify the expense as well as validates the "mining" technique. As such, you wouldn't need to return huge amounts of it suitable for industrial energy production; so it could simply be a small lift module, transit to Chinese space station with no time constraints, and they take it down from there as simple cargo. If it works, then its easy to justify expanding the operation on the moon.