Blinken says China agreed to ‘explore’ helping US combat fentanyl

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Chinese government has agreed to “explore” helping the United States combat fentanyl precursor chemicals used by Mexican cartels to create the deadly drug and which largely originate from China.

Blinken made the remarks Monday following a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing. The secretary of state did not say the Chinese government had actually agreed to resume its counternarcotics cooperation with the U.S., which Beijing formally suspended following then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) visit to Taiwan last year.

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“I raised as a priority the issue of synthetic opioids and fentanyl — a crisis in the United States. Fentanyl is the number one killer of Americans aged 18 to 49. I made clear that we need much greater cooperation on this critical issue,” Blinken said in Beijing. “We agreed to explore setting up a working group or joint effort so that we can shut off the flow of precursor chemicals which help fuel this crisis and a growing number of deaths.”

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller added that Blinken “underscored the importance of working together to disrupt the global flow of synthetic drugs and their precursor chemicals into the United States, which fuels the fentanyl crisis” and claimed both Washington and Beijing “underscored that the United States and China should work together to address shared transnational challenges, such as … counter-narcotics.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry announced in August it was implementing eight “countermeasures” in retaliation for Pelosi’s Taiwan visit, including “suspending China-U.S. counternarcotics cooperation.”

The Washington Examiner has reported on how Chinese money launderers and fentanyl-makers have gone into business with Mexican drug cartels and have made billions pushing fentanyl across the U.S. border.

The Trump administration pressured Xi in 2019 to make fentanyl illegal there, but drug labs in Wuhan and elsewhere which made most of the fentanyl making its way into the U.S. shifted to manufacturing the precursor ingredients for the drugs instead, and Chinese partnerships with drug traffickers in Mexico have expanded.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that more than 107,600 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021. More than 71,200 of those overdose deaths involved synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl.

There is a growing bipartisan congressional movement blaming China for supplying fentanyl precursor chemicals to cartels. Beijing denies this is occurring and points the finger at America.

Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China, spoke about the “fentanyl problem” in late April, claiming that “the government here in Beijing is not contributing to that problem, but black-market Chinese firms are and they’re shipping illicit precursor chemicals to the drug cartels in Mexico and Central America that make the fentanyl.”

This drew the ire of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and other Republican senators, who told Blinken in May they were “dismayed” by what Burns had said, contending that he was “clearly repeating the Communist Party’s talking points and ignoring years-long obstruction and inaction on the part of the CCP in enforcing its own counter-narcotic laws, much less international narcotics regulations.”

The Republicans said the U.S. “should continue to prioritize stopping the flow of fentanyl across our vulnerable southern border, [and] we must support those efforts by eradicating the fentanyl trade at its source: China,” adding “it is evident that Beijing has been an unwilling partner in our fight to end the fentanyl crisis.”

China was not designated a “Major Illicit Drug Producing Country” in 2022, and Rubio also lambasted the Biden administration over that in January.

Blinken announced last month that the Treasury Department had sanctioned 13 individuals and companies in China for their role in the production of illegal drugs, contending that “today’s actions further bolster those previously taken by the Biden-Harris administration as part of a whole-of-government offensive to save lives by disrupting illicit fentanyl supply chains around the globe.”

Burns did somewhat change his tune, arguing in early June that “we have been pushing very hard that the government of China use its considerable power to shut down the ability of these black market Chinese firms to sell fentanyl, and frankly, we have not seen progress on this issue.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin rejected the argument by Burns the next day.

The Commerce Department had sanctioned China’s Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science in 2020 for being “complicit in human rights violations and abuses committed in China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, forced labor and high-technology surveillance” against Muslim Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.

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Beijing has repeatedly tried to use that blacklisting as among its excuses for not cooperating with the U.S. on counternarcotics.

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