OPINION:
President Biden gushed when Chinese dictator Xi Jinping swore, with his hand on “The Communist Manifesto,” to stop sending addictive, deadly synthetic opioids to America to kill Americans.
But you only have to read a recent Treasury Department report about China’s establishment and its illegal drug push to realize Mr. Xi won’t keep his word.
In October, Treasury issued one of the most detailed reports on how China produces fentanyl chemicals and ships them to Mexican cartels, which then smuggle them across President Biden’s open border to us. Treasury names drug companies, not underworld traffickers, who carry out China’s plan to poison our citizens and weaken America.
Mr. Xi promised to stop sending the drugs to America to Mr. Biden in November. He could have done that years ago.
Actually, he did. At the 2018 G20 summit, he made the same pledge to then-President Donald Trump. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi agreed to “proactive steps to strengthen cooperation on law enforcement and combating illicit drugs, including the synthetic drug fentanyl.”
Did that happen? Mr. Xi instituted a few window-dressing moves.
But if he had really made a dent, why would Mr. Biden need another fake deal five years later? Why did the Biden administration need to financially sanction more Chinese drug companies and their bosses? Why does China remain our No. 1 source of illicit fentanyl?
If anything, China became even more evil. Post-2018, it ramped up shipments of xylazine, a tranquilizer for horses and cows. For American humans, dealers fold the drug, known as tranq, into fentanyl for a big deadly kick.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that over 70,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2022 resulted from illicit fentanyl.
The Treasury Department report singled out China’s fentanyl players. One is Hanhong Pharmaceuticals Technology. It has a working association with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the place where the FBI says the COVID-19 virus was born. Hanhong’s sales team has Mexican drug cartels on speed dial.
Hanhong also openly trades in tranq. The company maintains a vendor site on an illicit online drug marketplace. It features a “chat now” click to seal the order in U.S. dollars. $25 per kilogram. It’s cheap.
Xylazine has also been coined the “zombie drug,” the Treasury Department says, “because it can cause severe wounds in users, including necrosis — the rotting of human tissue — which may lead to amputation.”
And Hanhong also makes available online fluorophenylalanine, which Treasury says is a “fentanyl precursor with no known legitimate use.”
Even more brazen, Hanhong puts out ads offering fentanyl chemicals to Mexican buyers and talks with the country’s biggest and baddest drug army, the Sinaloa Cartel.
Treasury names other Chinese companies in the anti-American drug trade. Treasury identified one Du Changgen as the owner of Hanhong and other drug-pushing firms. Treasury says Mr. Du runs his own drug syndicate, which conducts the “international proliferation of illicit drugs.”
The Treasury Department financially sanctioned him and his companies. I doubt its impact. The syndicate deals in hard-to-trace virtual currencies.
After the Biden-Xi November meeting in San Francisco, the White House was downright giddy, saying that China “is now taking law enforcement action against illicit precursor suppliers, has issued a notice to industry warning Chinese companies against illicit trade in precursor chemicals and pill presses equipment, and has committed to restart key law enforcement cooperation.”
Bryan Burack, The Heritage Foundation’s China expert, assesses that the Chinese Communist Party is telling Mr. Biden what he wants to hear.
China “is clearly using the false promise of cooperation on drug crimes as permanent diplomatic leverage over gullible U.S. officials,” said Mr. Burack, who, as a congressional staffer, was China adviser to Rep. Michael McCaul, Texas Republican, now chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“Just look at what happened at President Biden’s concessionary summit with Xi Jinping in November: A full year of diplomatic appeasement and a quid-pro-quo removal of human rights sanctions, in return for nothing more than a press release from the CCP,” Mr. Burack said, using the abbreviation for the Chinese Communist Party.
He added: “At best, the CCP is willfully negligent towards industrial-scale drug pushers targeting the United States, tacitly allowing major narcotics operations and complicit in the deaths of thousands of Americans. The CCP runs a dystopian police state. It’s simply not credible to believe that they’re unable to shut down major drug rings.”
If Mr. Xi had truly lived up to his 2018 commitment, why did the Biden Justice Department in October indict eight Chinese companies and people on charges related to trafficking fentanyl?
“The two drug cartels that are responsible for fentanyl coming into the United States are the Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels,” said Anne Milgram, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “They work with chemical companies based in the People’s Republic of China to get their raw materials, which are chemicals called fentanyl precursors. Nearly all fentanyl precursors come from China.”
Since the Biden summit in November, Mr. Xi has ramped up threats against Taiwan and accused the West of oppressing China. He also honored Mao, the great mass murderer, with a pledge to bring communism to the world.
There’s a man we can trust.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.