The United States is grappling with a major fentanyl crisis. Of the more than 100,000 drug-related deaths recorded in 2023, approximately 70 percent are attributed to fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. This staggering number of deaths far exceeds the annual fatalities from car accidents (almost 41,000) and gun-related violence (roughly 43,000). The amount of powdered fentanyl seized has increased by about 100 percent in the last two years. Fentanyl misuse has emerged as a top election issue, with 80 percent of swing-state voters considering it important in their voting decisions, outranking topics such as abortion, climate change, and international conflicts.
The majority of the deadly synthetic opioid and its precursor chemicals are believed to originate in China. For years, the United States and China have struggled to collaborate in stemming the flow of fentanyl and its ingredients. Cooperation resumed following the summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in November 2023, and Beijing is moving toward helping to disrupt the global supply chain. However, it remains to be seen how solid these commitments are to jointly curbing the supply of precursors to the Mexican drug cartels that are primarily responsible for manufacturing illicit fentanyl.
Why is it so difficult to advance cooperation in this area? While escalating geopolitical rivalry plays an important role, a discussion that was held in Asia in May and sponsored by PAX Sapiens—a private foundation dedicated to addressing global threats against humanity—identified significant perception gaps between the two countries in counternarcotics cooperation. These gaps undermine mutual trust, discourage efforts to find common ground, and result in the two nations overlooking areas of potential cooperation that could curb the use of fentanyl in the United States.
The Chinese government asserts that it has been actively collaborating with Washington in combating drug trafficking. It has highlighted that in 2019, China took the lead globally by officially scheduling fentanyl substances as their own whole class and noted that the United States has not seized any fentanyl or its analogues originating from China since September 2019. More recently, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Chinese government has quietly shut down 14 digital sales platforms and removed more than 1,000 online stores selling precursor chemicals used by Mexican cartels.
U.S. officials, while acknowledging these steps as “meaningful,” continue to press Beijing for more substantial action. Washington’s lawmakers continue to believe that the Chinese government is helping fuel the fentanyl crisis within the United States. The select committee on China in the U.S. House of Representatives, for example, claims that the Chinese government “directly subsidizes” the manufacturing and exporting of illicit fentanyl. This perception gap regarding what China should and can do undermines trust and poisons the atmosphere of cooperation.
Both countries still dispute China’s role in the supply chain of fentanyl and related substances. Last September, the United States added China to its list of major drug-producing countries for the first time. It is convinced that China is the primary source of fentanyl’s precursor chemicals. China dismisses this as a false accusation, stating that the United States has not provided any evidence to prove it.
Because most of the precursors are unscheduled due to their dual use, China lacks legal provisions to prosecute those who knowingly ship precursors to Mexican cartels. The inability to reach a consensus on China’s role in the supply chain partly explains the lack of progress toward addressing the precursor problem. It was not until May 2019 that Beijing scheduled two key fentanyl precursors, and it was not until late 2023 that Beijing took law enforcement action against illicit precursor supplies.
According to one Chinese scholar who spoke at the Pax dialogue—which was conducted under the Chatham House Rule, meaning that its participants cannot be identified—defining the Chinese government’s role in this way misinterprets normal, legal economic activities of China on the basis of malicious political bias. It also dampens the momentum of U.S.-China cooperation. Indeed, instead of being enthusiastic about a rare joint counternarcotics investigation and high-level bilateral talks on anti-narcotics cooperation that were held in June, House members from both parties are forming a new policy working group to strengthen existing sanctions on Chinese entities involved in the fentanyl trade.
Even when the two sides cooperate, however, they do so for very different ends. Washington prefers to treat narcotics cooperation as a standalone law enforcement issue, while China links counternarcotics to broader geostrategic objectives. U.S. policymakers and law enforcement officials have long hoped that China would separate cooperation from geopolitics. Emphasizing that it does not have a large-scale fentanyl abuse problems among its citizens, China argues that its regulatory actions are to help the United States for humanitarian reasons.
However, China uses cooperation as a strategic tool to leverage other objectives, including improving the overall bilateral relationship or extracting concessions from the United States in other geopolitical areas of concern, such as Taiwan or the South China Sea. This approach not only results in half-hearted cooperation, but also makes existing arrangements vulnerable to crises in other fields. Beijing’s hopes for better U.S.-China relations overall declined following then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. It subsequently suspended its anti-drug cooperation with the United States. It is conceivable that a future crisis over Taiwan or the South China Sea—both now more likely than ever—could quickly derail any real progress in bilateral counternarcotics cooperation.
A wider issue is that the U.S. government blames external factors, especially China, as the root cause of its domestic synthetic opioid abuse. According to one Department of Homeland Security official who testified before Congress, the fentanyl crisis “begins and ends in China.” In response, Beijing views Washington as acting in bad faith and attributes the crisis to a U.S. failure to address its demand side of the equation. China’s official statements argue that domestic factors in the United States, such as lax regulation of psychotropic drugs and political polarization, are the root cause of the problem.
This approach has some resonance with the U.S, public. When asked, regardless of blame, who should be held responsible for fixing the problem, a majority of U.S. respondents (51 percent) in a forthcoming PAX Sapiens-commissioned YouGov poll demonstrated agreement with the Chinese view by saying that the U.S. federal government should be responsible for fixing the problem, compared with 4 percent who identified China as being responsible for fixing the problem.
That said, blaming the crisis on a laissez-faire U.S. approach fails to recognize Washington’s investments in prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery support services. More importantly, the perception that Washington is primarily to blame has been used to justify indifference and inaction by the Chinese government.
On the other hand, within the United States, opinions on China’s role in the fentanyl crisis are split between those who view Chinese authorities as merely indifferent and a surprisingly large group of those who see them as actively malicious. In Washington, D.C., many are convinced, or claim to be, that China is deliberately weaponizing fentanyl against the United States. An overly heavy emphasis on China has led Washington to take coercive actions against Chinese individuals, companies, and other entities, which only reinforces China’s defensive posture and results in the continuation of minimal collaboration with the United States.
While China is increasingly participating in global narcotics governance, it refuses to join the U.S.-led Global Coalition to Address Synthetic Drug Threats, which now has 151 participating countries. Driven by concern about U.S. attempts to build alliances against it, China prefers to work within existing global governance structures, such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the International Narcotics Control Board, or in other structures where it has a greater role to play, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
In contrast, the U.S. strategy in engaging global narcotics governance focuses on developing new coalitions of like-minded states to address U.S. priority concerns. While the Washington has not explicitly excluded China from its global coalition, Chinese experts argue that the United States refused to involve China in the coalition’s creation, potentially sacrificing counternarcotics progress to broader U.S. foreign policy goals around opposition to China. This lack of convergence in their global governance strategies leads to misaligned stakeholder incentives, making a truly multilateral approach that involves all the major stakeholders, including Mexico, difficult.
Fundamental differences in treatment also hamper cooperation. China relies heavily on a predominantly centralized and involuntary approach to tackle its domestic drug issues. Claiming success with this approach, it lacks strong incentives to learn from the United States’ best practices for demand reduction, prevention, and treatment.
In contrast, the U.S. model emphasizes voluntary participation, harm reduction, and community reintegration. It underappreciates the effectiveness of China’s surveillance measures and its ability to quickly take model projects to a large scale. Differences in cultural and governance priorities also create barriers to learning from each other, leaving both focused on specific actions that the two countries may otherwise be willing to take together.
Both the United States and China acknowledge the tragic nature of fentanyl-related deaths and have agreed to work together to address the crisis. Substantial progress, however, hinges on bridging perception gaps and moving beyond counterproductive finger-pointing.
As one participant at the PAX Sapiens dialogue aptly stated, we must “seek to understand before seeking to be understood.”
Fentanyl marks the beginning of a new era of synthetic opioids, presenting a unique opportunity for the United States and China to establish cooperative models that could enhance international counternarcotics efforts for generations. Failure to collaborate effectively will impair global approaches to combating future designer synthetic opioids, which will be manufactured with chemical formulas that are constantly changing and evolving.
To advance collaboration, both nations must move past blaming and focus on solutions grounded in evidence and expanded data-sharing. This requires frequent communication at both the official and expert levels, with regular reports detailing progress and identifying roadblocks. While the bilateral counternarcotic working group initiated in January and a direct line of communication on emerging threats from new synthetic substances established in June are a positive start, a comprehensive approach is essential.
Both countries should be open to learning from each other’s best practices and exploring innovative collaborations that transcend traditional law enforcement approaches. By fostering mutual understanding of their respective policy measures, the United States and China can build the trust crucial for effective partnership. These efforts are not merely diplomatic niceties, but also critical steps to save lives and shield communities from the devastating impact of illicit synthetic opioids.
Shame on all of us if we cannot rise to this challenge.
The post Washington and Beijing Don’t Understand Each Other’s Fentanyl Positions appeared first on Foreign Policy.
