China has pledged to stem a flood of the synthetic opioid fentanyl onto US streets, where it kills thousands of people per month, but US security experts are skeptical about whether Beijing is willing, or even able, to follow through.
Ten current and former US officials, congressional sources, and China and trade experts said in interviews that China cooperates only when it believes it will get something in return.
In this case, Beijing appears to have offered its help so that it could get the best deal possible from Washington in trade negotiations, several said.
IIllustration: Mountain People
“Will they enforce this, or is this just another gesture to be used to secure something they want?” said Robin Cleveland, vice chair of the congressional US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which monitors the national security impact of bilateral trade and economic ties.
“I think they would hope to leverage it in some meaningful way in the context of trade talks,” she said.
Those trade talks ran into trouble last week with China backtracking on earlier commitments to change its laws in key areas, including intellectual property rights, trade secrets, forced technology transfers, access to financial services and currency manipulation, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing US government and private-sector sources.
US President Donald Trump on Friday last week responded to China by vowing to raise tariffs on US$200 billion of Chinese goods from 10 to 25 percent.
Unless resolved in a new round of negotiations, the mounting tensions over trade could derail China’s cooperation on fentanyl.
“They are not going to do it, the record says, unless they get a trade deal or we threaten them in the absence of a trade deal,” said Derek Scissors, an expert on Sino-US economic relations at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. “They can stop this if they want, but they won’t unless they see a deal.”
An explosion in the use of fentanyl, an opioid painkiller 50 times more potent than heroin, and its analogues has driven the most devastating chapter of the US’ long-running opioid crisis, and China accounts for most of the fentanyl and fentanyl analogues seized, US law enforcement agencies say.
The US in 2017 recorded more than 28,000 synthetic opioid-related overdose deaths, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the majority of them fentanyl-related.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in December last year promised Trump at a summit in Argentina that Beijing would crack down on flows of all fentanyl-related substances.
Last month, China pledged that from May 1 it would expand the list of narcotics subject to state control to the more than 1,400 known fentanyl analogues, which have a slightly different chemical makeup, but are all addictive and potentially deadly, as well as any new ones to be developed.
Fentanyl and all of its analogues are controlled substances subject to strict regulation in the US.
Speaking in Beijing on Friday last week, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Geng Shuang (耿爽) said that China had implemented the change as promised starting from May 1, a move he said had been positively appraised by the US.
“I want to emphasize here that China keeps to its word,” he told a daily news briefing. “At the same time, I would also like to point out that the root cause of the US fentanyl problem is not in China.”
Asked whether there was a link between China’s promised increased controls on fentanyl and trade talks with the US, Geng said: “I don’t know what person has such an imagination.”
The Chinese Ministry of Public Security, National Health Commission and National Medical Products Administration — the departments responsible for the new rules — did not respond to requests for comment on this story. The White House also did not respond to requests for comment.
The regulatory change is supposed to shut down the operations of illicit producers and traffickers who advertise and sell fentanyl products on video Web sites, including YouTube and Vimeo, and on the dark Web.
They deliver the drugs to the US market mainly in the mail, through express delivery services or trans-shipping them through Mexico and Canada.
Trump hailed the agreement as a major advance in efforts to contain the opioid epidemic.
Some US officials who work directly with Chinese law enforcement agencies say they believe Beijing is committed to clamping down.
“We see them as a partner we want to work with to effect that change of availability here in the US,” said Daniel Baldwin, a senior US Drug Enforcement Administration official who was its top representative in Beijing from 2011 to 2014.
The China Daily last week covered the plans to expand the controlled substances list under the headline “China, US join hands to fight fentanyl.”
However, even US Attorney General William Barr has said it is too soon to claim victory.
“Whether the Chinese ... actually deliver on it from an enforcement standpoint remains to be seen,” Barr testified at a US House of Representatives budget hearing last month.
Beijing has reneged on pacts with Washington before, US experts say.
In 2017, the bulk of fentanyl seizures by US Customs and Border Protection came from China, despite an agreement announced in September 2016 by the administration of former US president Barack Obama on “enhanced measures” to fight trafficking to the US.
China later said it made no such agreement.
China in 2015 added fentanyl, 24 analogues and two precursors to its narcotics control list, leading to a sharp reduction in those products, but manufacturers sidestepped the controls by synthesizing new analogues, some of them even more potent and deadly than the original.
They are to remain legal until China follows through on its promise to control all forms of fentanyl.
US law enforcement officials worry that China will not be able to fully enforce this new crackdown either, even if it sticks to its promise to try.
Its oversight of more than an estimated 400,000 producers and distributors inside vast chemical and pharmaceutical industries is notoriously weak, and enforcement agencies are short of inspectors and weakened by corruption, US experts said.
Fentanyl analogues are relatively easy to make and some producers create front companies to sell fentanyl to traffickers, the experts said.
Further, local Chinese Communist Party officials are under pressure to hit targets for economic growth and so are often reluctant to shut down any growing businesses, including pharmaceutical firms, they added.
Chinese customs enforcement appears to be even weaker. Officials stopped fewer than a half dozen fentanyl-related shipments in 2016 and 2017 before they could be shipped out of China, according to US Senator Dianne Feinstein, a cochair of the US Senate’s Caucus on International Narcotics Control.
US officials have found Chinese inaction frustrating.
“As sophisticated as China is in their intelligence services, I find it odd that they can’t stem the flow of fentanyl from their country,” FBI Deputy Executive Director for Intelligence Joshua Skule said before Beijing announced it would control all fentanyl-related substances.
China has since 2017 provided the US with information that aided in federal indictments of eight Chinese nationals for fentanyl trafficking, but all of the suspects remain at large in China, according to a US Congressional Research Service report in December last year.
“There are many, many laws on Chinese books that don’t get enforced. It will turn out that enforcement is quite spotty,” Scissors said.
However, China’s government is committed to making a difference on this case, said Daniel Baldwin, who served as the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s top representative in Beijing for three years.
“We see them as a partner we want to work with to effect that change of availability here in the US,” he said.
A bipartisan group of senators has introduced a bill to empower Trump to sanction Chinese drug makers and others who knowingly sell synthetic opioids to traffickers. It also would create a commission to monitor flows of the substances from overseas.
“We have to make sure they keep their word,” said US Senator Tom Cotton, a cosponsor of the legislation.
Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in Beijing
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