Opinion: Why is China refusing to stop the flow of fentanyl?
A visitor takes a photograph at an exhibition at a museum in Shenzhen, China. By John Pomfret John Pomfret Bio Follow March 4 at 12:47 PM As Washington and Beijing lumber toward a deal on trade, a look at why little has changed on another key front is an important reminder that agreements with China often follow a predictable pattern: big breakthrough, maybe even a Rose Garden announcement, followed by … not much.
Second, despite Xi’s promises to do more, there has been no serious push from the top of the Communist Party to break this logjam. Fentanyl is hard to stop because most countries, including China and the United States, place specific chemicals on a control list. All you have to do to keep a fentanyl-like drug off the list is to tweak a few molecules and, voila, you’ve made another variety.
On Dec. 3, two days after Trump announced his fentanyl deal with Xi, the state-run Global Times repurposed that line, arguing that only ifthe United States cut its dependence on drugs would the problem be solved. The Global Times also hypothesized that white Americans were more susceptible to fentanyl than “other ethnic groups,” a claim that Westerners made about Chinese addiction to opium 150 years ago.
Tensions date back to 1990, when, following the Tiananmen Square crackdown on student-led protesters, a federal judge in California allowed a convicted Chinese drug dealer to stay in the United States because the drug trafficker feared execution back home.
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