Chinese Official Mocks U.S. Opioid Crisis as Biden Admin Seeks Cooperation on Fentanyl

China’s foreign ministry gloated over America’s opioid crisis, posting a message online today arguing that it proves the superiority of the Chinese Communist Party’s governance model.

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, a stridently anti-U.S. voice on social media, posted a series of messages condemning the U.S. and emphasizing that “China won’t become the U.S.” One of those posts said that “China does not allow the drug problem to haunt the nation and kill 100,000+ per year”; it was accompanied by an image of an apparently unconscious man surrounded by people who appeared to be administering naloxone, an overdose treatment drug.

The tweet comes as the Biden administration appears to hold out hope that Beijing will work with Washington to combat the flow of precursor chemicals used in the production of fentanyl.

Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman explained that the Biden administration is still hoping to seek cooperation with Beijing on a variety of issues, even after a spy balloon linked to China’s military drifted across the continental U.S.

“It would be really critical if we could re-establish our counter-narcotics effort,” she said, during an event at the Brookings Institution last week. “There is enough fentanyl in the United States today to kill every one of us,” she added.

Although most fentanyl is produced in Mexico, the Drug Enforcement Administration has found that Chinese fentanyl traffickers now export fentanyl precursors to cartels in Mexico, according to a 2021 report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. “China remains the primary country of origin for illicit fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances trafficked in the United States,” the report states.

And while China acted to ban fentanyl in 2019, subsequent action has lagged. Following then-speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan last summer, the Chinese government suspended a number of dialogues with the U.S., including one on counter-narcotics. Eventually, Chinese officials resumed their talks with John Kerry, the administration’s special envoy for climate, but they have declined to do so on fentanyl-related issues.

The State Department said in late January that resuming cooperation on that front was a priority for Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s scheduled trip to China. However, that visit was postponed in the aftermath of the spy-balloon saga, and the frosty meeting between Blinken and his Chinese counterpart during a conference in Munich last weekend strongly suggests that further dialogue is not in the offing.

Some Republicans have assailed the Biden administration for treading too softly on fentanyl-related issues.

During a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the topic last week, Senator Bill Hagerty slammed the three U.S. officials in attendance for not going further in their criticism of Beijing on narcotics trafficking.

“Each of the three of you have been charged with addressing this surge, yet it continues to run rampant,” he said. “The No. 1 killer of Americans today, of young people between the ages of 18 and 45, is drug overdose, most of it fentanyl coming across our southern border being supplied by China.”

Hagerty further criticized President Biden for declining to mention the issue in his State of the Union address and Blinken for failing to mention China’s work with Mexican cartels in a January statement announcing sanctions on Mexican entities involved in fentanyl trafficking.

Noting that a Treasury Department statement on the sanctions mentioned China’s role in the crisis, the senator asked Todd Robinson, the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law-enforcement affairs, whether there was internal disagreement between his bureau and the bureau of East Asian and Pacific affairs on whether to mention China in the statement. “There was debate, there was discussion, but at the end of the day we agreed on the statement that the secretary [made],” Robinson answered.

Based on Sherman’s remarks, it seems unlikely that the State Department will take up hard-edged criticism of Beijing’s reluctance to act on the export of fentanyl precursors. She stopped short of laying blame squarely on the Chinese regime and instead described it as a global challenge: “Global health is another area in which we all need to work together, and the issue of fentanyl is not just a counter-narcotics issue. It is a global public-health issue, a huge global public-health issue,” she said.