WASHINGTON — The U.S. must take stronger action to hold China accountable for its significant role in fentanyl trafficking, which has fueled America’s unprecedented fentanyl crisis, analysts said.
“A tiny person like her managed to survive homelessness, hunger and overcome heroin addiction. She actually recovered from heroin addiction, but fentanyl left her with obstructed airflow to her lungs, leading to aspiration. In fact, her vomit got into her lungs and cut off the oxygen supply to her brain.”
Steve Yates, who served as Deputy National Security Advisor to former Vice President Dick Cheney, recalled the last moments of his daughter’s life at a seminar on China and the fentanyl issue held by the Heritage Foundation on Sept. 9, 2024.
Yates’s 24-year-old daughter died in October 2023 from a fentanyl overdose, after overcoming a host of challenges and low points in her short life. Fentanyl caused her lungs to spasm, her heart to stop and her brain to die from prolonged lack of oxygen.
Yates is just one of the hundreds of thousands of American parents who have lost their children to fentanyl. According to U.S. government data, fentanyl has become the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45, with 75,000 losing their lives to the drug in 2023.
Anne Milgram, who heads the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said in May 2024 that the United States was facing “the most devastating drug crisis in our nation’s history.”
Fentanyl is a colorless and odorless synthetic opioid used to relieve severe pain. Pure fentanyl is approximately 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine.
Fentanyl is used on its own, or mixed into counterfeit prescription drugs, heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine, with many overdose victims unaware they were consuming fentanyl at all.
An ‘opium war’ against the U.S.?
The Heritage Foundation released a report on Sept. 9, 2024, titled “Holding China and Mexico Accountable for America’s Fentanyl Crisis,” which pointed out that America’s fentanyl crisis “stems directly from the Chinese Communist Party.”
According to the report, Mexican drug cartels play the most visible and well-publicized role in driving the fentanyl crisis. But, “Across the Pacific Ocean, however, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) drives the destabilizing flow of fentanyl directly to the United States. Indeed, unknown to most Americans, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is actively funding, supporting, and pushing America’s most deadly drug threat in history.”
China is playing an increasingly active role in the fentanyl trafficking network in the Western Hemisphere (the United States, Mexico, and Canada), the report said. Fentanyl precursor chemicals are shipped from China through high-traffic ports, often concealed in mislabeled containers, it said.
When they arrive, Mexican drug cartels use these precursor chemicals to manufacture fentanyl for distribution, then smuggle the opioid into the U.S., the report said, adding that related Chinese businesses and money launderers are active in Mexico and even in the U.S.
The report found that Chinese businesses in North America have partnered with money launderers using “mirror swaps” to avoid direct transfers of drug money from the United States to Mexico, thereby evading U.S. law enforcement.
The fentanyl crisis has already caused the deaths of more Americans than the Vietnam War, according to the report.
In April 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives' Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party released another significant investigative report calling out China for being the primary driver of the fentanyl crisis.
It said the CCP directly subsidizes the manufacturing and export of illegal fentanyl ingredients, as well as implementing a tax rebate program that effectively encourages exports of certain fentanyl precursors.
The Chinese government also allows the public sale of fentanyl precursors and other illegal materials on the Chinese internet, which is otherwise strictly controlled.
Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr told a congressional hearing held by the Committee that nearly all of the ingredients used in fentanyl entering the U.S. are produced in China.
“Without the production and export of Chinese fentanyl and fentanyl precursors, the United States would not have a fentanyl crisis, and this mass slaughter would effectively be halted in its tracks,” he said.
Lawrence Kadish, a board member of the Gatestone Institute, wrote on Sept. 11th that fentanyl may be a weapon consciously deployed by China against the U.S. and carefully designed to weaken America’s national power, directly drawing a parallel with the Opium Wars in China.
He said that the rulers of China, who are deeply familiar with the Opium Wars, are all too aware of the insidious ways in which drugs can undermine a society, likening fentanyl to “a dagger thrust to the heart of America.”
“They (China) have obviously determined that it (fentanyl) may be a far more cost-effective way to harm the United States than the trillions of yuan spent to greatly expand their military forces. Without a shot being fired at our nation, the Chinese believe they have found a way of reducing America to a second-rate nation. They may well be embracing the edict, “Do to them as was done to us” – poison America with drugs,” Kadish wrote.
Yates said the fentanyl crisis has caused far more severe damage to the United States than the Opium Wars did to China.
“First, the U.S. didn’t take part in the Opium Wars. Second, the number of American families affected by fentanyl deaths and related incidents far exceeds the number of Chinese families affected by opium at that time. The regions in China affected by the opium trade were much smaller than those affected by fentanyl today,” Yates said.
He noted that the number of fentanyl overdoses is skyrocketing in every state in the U.S., and the numbers don’t just run into dozens, but into the hundreds of thousands.
“This is chemical warfare being waged on American families and communities,” Yates said, adding that the crisis has severely disrupted economic and social structures in the United States, putting future generations in jeopardy.
According to Yates, the crisis is due in part to Washington’s failure to pick up on warning signals from the Chinese Communist Party, ignoring Beijing’s “deadly and evil nature.”
Yates believes that the CCP’s motivation for exporting the fentanyl crisis is to “hollow out America from within” and divide the society.
“What if they could really disrupt and destroy communities in every state, regardless of income, wealth, race, or religion? Sometimes people think that only addicts can be poisoned (by fentanyl), but anyone can be affected,” he said.
According to a recent national opinion poll by McLaughlin & Associates, one-third of respondents admitted they know someone who has been harmed by fentanyl, and more than half believed that China has made a conscious decision to manufacture fentanyl ingredients, and that U.S.-China diplomatic relations should be contingent upon China shutting down the fentanyl factories.
But Vanda Felbab-Brown, director of the Brookings Institution’s Initiative on Non-State Armed Actors, told Voice of America (VOA) that there isn’t any solid evidence for the claim that the CCP is deliberately fueling the fentanyl crisis.
“Anyone making that claim would only be able to prove it by eavesdropping on the PLA or the Politburo or the upper echelons of the Communist Party. I highly doubt that the Heritage Foundation has such eavesdropping capabilities,” she said.
John Coyne, head of the North Australia Strategic Policy Centre and Strategic Policing and Law Enforcement at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), told VOA that while some Chinese military scholars have discussed using drugs to wage a kind of total warfare against the West, that doesn’t mean it’s official CCP policy.
Fentanyl as a bargaining chip
The fentanyl issue is an increasingly thorny topic in U.S.-China relations.
In August 2022, in retaliation for the then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, China completely suspended all cooperation with the U.S. on drug control.
In November 2023, that cooperation was restarted following a breakthrough summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco, and a U.S.-China joint “Counter-Narcotics Working Group” was re-established in January 2024.
The fentanyl issue was also among the key topics during National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s visit to China at the end of August 2024.
“We’re going to look for further progress on counternarcotics and reducing the flow of illegal synthetic drugs into the United States,” Sullivan said before concluding his visit to Beijing.
There was further progress in anti-drug cooperation between the two countries this month.
According to a Chinese government directive, Beijing said it would implement stricter regulations on the production and sale of three basic precursor chemicals used to manufacture illegal fentanyl, including requiring exporters to obtain licenses, effective on Sept. 1, 2024. This move was its third since the U.S. and China resumed bilateral anti-drug cooperation in November 2023.
These three chemicals, 4-AP, 1-boc-4-AP, and norfentanyl, were blacklisted by the United Nations Narcotics Committee in March 2022.
Yet experts worry that the new measures from the Chinese government will only address the symptoms rather than the root causes.
Liu Zongyuan, a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on September 12 that one challenge faced by Chinese regulatory agencies is that the chemical properties of new fentanyl variants are unique and emerge faster than the government can list them as controlled substances.
In 2016 alone, China created 63 new variants of fentanyl, compared to only six new variants between 2012 and 2015.
According to ASPI’s Coyne, if the CCP doesn’t address its systemic support for the illegal drug trade, the control of these three precursor chemicals will be nothing more than a face-saving public relations stunt, he asserted.
“The new controls do nothing to dismantle the domestic policies that have led to China’s fentanyl dominance, and they apply to only three precursor materials out of hundreds produced, promoted and exported by China over the past two decades... That market dominance is the result of the promotion and protection of illicit pharmaceutical industries by the CCP,” Coyne wrote.
Carrie Filipetti, executive director of the Vandenberg Coalition, a nonprofit organization of U.S. foreign policy leaders, told VOA that despite appearing to cooperate with the U.S., the CCP has deliberately used fentanyl to undermine U.S. security for many years, with President Xi turning a blind eye.
“China has been involved in this for many years. And China’s indifference to this issue has clearly hardened since 2019. Back then, Xi basically said that all of this stuff is illegal, yet they have still turned a blind eye. We have seen China supplying the drug cartels for over a decade now,” she said.
As part of their drug control cooperation exchange, Washington lifted sanctions on the Chinese Institute of Forensic Science (IFS) last November, after it was put on the entity list by the Department of Commerce for its involvement in human rights violations in Xinjiang.
Filipetti said China is trying to use fentanyl diplomacy as a bargaining chip to ease pressure from the Biden administration over its human rights abuses.
“They are basically saying that if you lift sanctions linked to our human rights record, we will coordinate with you, but these issues should not be linked. China is actively killing Americans through drug trafficking while also committing genocide against the Uyghurs. They need to be held accountable for both issues. Unfortunately, I believe that the U.S.-China joint drug control task force has become more about words than actual results,” she said.
Beijing’s inaction
Faced with accusations and pressure from the U.S., the Chinese government denied any connection to the illegal fentanyl trafficking occurring in Mexico for years, blaming the U.S.’s fentanyl abuse problem onto its own regulatory and demand.
Michael Brown, a retired DEA agent, told the New York Sun that “China controls everything from the highest level. There is no doubt about that.” He said that China “knows and monitors” all communications between chemical companies but does nothing.
ASPI’s Coyne said Beijing has it entirely within its power to stop the flow of synthetic opioids, including fentanyl and its precursors, if it really wanted to, citing the tight control wielded by Xi Jinping over China’s economy and the private sector, as well as his command over one of the world’s most effective systems for monitoring citizens.
“Currently, I believe their regulation efforts only focus on suppliers selling illegal drugs to Chinese citizens in mainland China,” Coyne said.
Filipetti from the Vandenberg Coalition shared a similar view.
“China has one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated national monitoring systems. The CCP knows everything that happens in China,” she said. “If Xi Jinping wanted to, he could end all of this immediately.”
Yates also believes that Xi and the CCP leadership have the ability to end the fentanyl crisis but that genuine effort has been lacking.
“In China, no one can engage in unapproved activities on a large scale. So this means that this (fentanyl) is an approved activity. Regardless of whether it is down to Xi Jinping personally or his government, this situation has persisted... I think it is impossible to claim that they (CCP) are unaware or that they have made efforts. They have not.”
In stark contrast to the large number of deaths caused by fentanyl in the U.S., the Chinese government claimed that it has yet to discover any large-scale abuse of fentanyl-like substances within China, nor any cases of deaths resulting from the use of fentanyl-like substances.
Next steps
In addition to diplomatic measures, the U.S. Treasury Department has imposed sanctions on dozens of Chinese entities and individuals involved in the production of chemicals used to manufacture fentanyl.
The Biden administration has also increased funding and technical input to intercept fentanyl at entry points and expanded access to treatment for victims, among other measures.
Felbab-Brown from the Brookings Institution said the Biden administration has been clever about putting pressure on China, leading to at least limited PRC cooperation with the U.S. on anti-money laundering for the first time.
“In my view, much of this cooperation is merely formal, but it is better than the previous scenario (zero cooperation from 2021 to the end of 2023), in which China completely refused to cooperate,” she said.
The U.S. also needs to demand that China do more in customer identity verification (KCL) regulations and prosecuting to effectively and decisively prosecuteing individuals who knowingly cooperate with organized crime groups within its legal system, Felbab-Brown said.
Yates said that fentanyl and its precursors should be treated as weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and those involved in money laundering and trafficking should be expelled from the international financial system.
“Anyone involved in the manufacture and illegal transfer of such dangerous chemical weapons should get completely barred from the financial system... Without that, we are not really serious about commemorating the American victims,” Yates said.
Filipetti said it’s necessary to form a consensus on CCP collusion.
“I think more needs to be done. We (at least) need to recognize that he (Xi Jinping) is waging a war against the American people.”
She said the U.S. needs to hold the CCP accountable and make Xi pay the price.
“When Americans are killed, we need to trace these financial flows. We need to impose more sanctions on individuals, including those government officials who are complicit. We need to ensure that we strengthen security cooperation with Mexico to prevent any attempts to smuggle drugs across the border. Ultimately, we need to ensure that Xi Jinping pays a high price for allowing these issues (the fentanyl crisis) to continue, so that he decides to change,” she said.
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