Who is responsible for the United States’ opioid epidemic? According to the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, the culprits are “transnational criminal enterprises” who need to be tackled via international law enforcement operations.
But according to Chinese state media, “the fentanyl crisis in the United States is demand-driven”, primarily by “the users themselves”.
Blinken was speaking at the launch of a US-led coalition to address synthetic drug threats, which gathered virtually last week. China, which many US lawmakers blame for the crisis, declined to participate.
As a string of US officials visit China this summer, the Americans are hoping that Beijing will do more to crack down on businesses and individuals that sell fentanyl precursors to international drugs cartels.
Precursors are the chemicals that can be mixed into the lethal opioid. But so far China has reacted angrily to suggestions that it bears any responsibility for the US drugs problem.
As relations between the two countries have soured, the drugs death toll has continued to rise. In 2022, more than 107,000 died from drug overdoses, up from about 71,000 in 2019.
Two-thirds of last year’s deaths involved synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, which the US Drug Enforcement Administration says comes largely from China, via cartels in Mexico.
Last month, two Chinese nationals were arrested by the US authorities for alleged fentanyl trafficking.
The arrests of Chen Yiyi and Wang Qingzhou, who had been caught in Fiji, hung in the air as Blinken embarked on a long-awaited trip to Beijing less than two weeks later.
High on the agenda for the meetings with Chinese officials, including China’s president, Xi Jinping, was seeking Beijing’s help in curbing the flow of fentanyl and related products into the US. Janet Yellen, the US treasury secretary, was also believed to have raised the issue on her visit last week.
But days after Blinken left Beijing, the US justice department filed criminal charges against Chen and Wang, along with six other Chinese nationals and four Chinese chemical manufacturing companies.
China described the arrests as illegal and demanded the immediate release of its citizens.
“China could very likely react with great anger and see this as a dirty trick, a betrayal of whatever was agreed in Blinken’s trip,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and expert on global drugs policy.
Some had hoped that fentanyl control was one area in which Beijing and Washington might find common ground, outside more adversarial areas such as trade and technology.
But from Beijing’s perspective, all avenues of cooperation are subordinate to geopolitical negotiations. In August 2022, after the then US House speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, China officially suspended all dialogue.
That means that Washington and Beijing are not able to share intelligence on supply chains linked to criminal gangs or money laundering investigations.
Although the precursors sold by chemical companies in China have a range of legitimate medical uses, Felbab-Brown notes that signs of criminality are often obvious, such as packages being shipped with instructions on how to evade Mexican customs inspections. China has not acted on US intelligence or indictments since 2018.
Part of the problem is that the Chinese government considers itself to have gone further than most in counter-narcotics. In 2019, at the behest of the US, China scheduled all forms of fentanyl, the only major country to do so on a permanent basis. In the US, fentanyl analogues are only temporarily controlled, with the classification set to expire in December 2024.
In November 2019, nine people were convicted in a court in Hebei of trafficking fentanyl into the US, concluding an operation that had started two years earlier in New Orleans. Such collaboration would be impossible in today’s climate.
Since then, the cross-border flow of fentanyl and its analogues has become more complex. Rahul Gupta, the director of the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, noted in February that China’s classification of fentanyl-related substances created “downstream effects”.
“Traffickers adjusted from sending shipments of finished illicit fentanyl directly to the US to instead sending precursor chemicals to Mexico, where illicit fentanyl production has proliferated.”
Mexico has committed to participating in the US’s new coalition on synthetic drugs threats. But despite the fact that US-China meetings have ticked up in recent weeks, China shows no signs of being willing to participate.
In comments made the day after the coalition’s first meeting, Wang Wenbin, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, accused the US of smears and said the ball was in the US’s court to “undo its wrong moves” and repair relations.
Washington would like counter-narcotics to be above politics. Beijing would beg to differ.
