Is Trump right to point the finger at China over the fentanyl crisis?

Donald Trump has threatened to impose sweeping tariffs on China and other countries that fail to stop the shipment of drugs to the United States. This week, the US presidential candidate announced that he would impose a 25% tariff on goods imported from China, Mexico, and Canada if elected. The move is aimed at pressuring these countries to address the drug problem within the US.

Trump further targeted China, specifically pointing out the emerging superpower’s role in the US opioid crisis, which kills thousands of Americans each year. On his social media platform, Truth Social, he posted that he wanted to impose an “additional 10% tariff” on goods from China until the flow of illegal drugs, particularly fentanyl, is stopped. Trump stated that he has had “many conversations with China about the massive amounts of drugs, especially fentanyl, being shipped into the United States, but to no avail.”

However, China has challenged Trump’s claims about the flow of deadly synthetic opioids into the US. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson stated, “China is one of the strictest countries in the world when it comes to drug control policy and enforcement. Fentanyl is a problem of the United States. In the spirit of humanitarianism, China has provided support for the United States to deal with this problem.”

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 100 times more potent than heroin, is a major driver of the drug overdose crisis in the United States. Of the more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths reported in the US in 2022, around 71,000 were linked to fentanyl. Even a two-milligram dose can be lethal. Although fentanyl and other synthetic opioids are smuggled into the US by Mexican drug cartels, almost all of the global supply originates in China.

Chinese exporters avoid direct shipments of illicit fentanyl to the US by sending precursor chemicals to Mexico, where they are then made into fentanyl and shipped into the US. John Coyne, a global law enforcement expert at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said it is difficult to determine if the Chinese government is turning a blind eye to this. “We’re talking about a pharmaceutical and chemical industry that has grown over the past few decades,” he said. “There are thousands and thousands of facilities there, so to have compliance checks on all of them is a very challenging activity.” He also noted that a US government investigation highlighted how China helps this trade. “In some provinces, subsidies are provided to companies that have no other purpose than to manufacture chemical precursors for fentanyl,” Coyne said.

Last year, US President Joe Biden met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping to launch talks between Beijing and Washington on the fentanyl crisis. Since then, China has been regulating globally banned chemical precursors to regulate what is made available to the public. But this has done little to reduce the opioid crisis in the US. While China maintains that the disaster is essentially a US problem, Coyne points out that the Chinese government's vast security apparatus could be a potential weapon in cracking down on chemical precursor exports. He said claims by Trump and other US right-wing figures that Beijing is deliberately trying to undermine the US with fentanyl are false. “It’s more that China is choosing not to deal with the problem,” he said.