Why we should be wary of China’s pledges of a fentanyl 'crackdown'

Despite the high-minded rhetoric at APEC, making real progress through bilateral security cooperation with the Mexicans while holding China accountable for its complicity in the drug trade remains a crucial, yet under-addressed challenge facing the Biden administration and Congress.

One of the headline-grabbing announcements from President Biden’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in San Francisco last month was China’s commitment to reduce the flow of chemical precursors for illicit synthetic drugs like fentanyl to Mexico. Fentanyl was also a major topic in meetings both leaders had with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit. While the Biden administration is taking a victory lap, readouts from these three bilateral meetings accentuate just how far they are from serious action to arrest the flow of fentanyl into American communities.

If a Chinese fentanyl “crackdown” sounds familiar, it’s because in 2018 Xi made commitments to President Trump to target the flow of fentanyl and some precursors from China to the United States. Lax enforcement in China and a shift in fentanyl production from China to Mexico, however, kept drugs flowing into the United States, with fentanyl overdose deaths more than doubling from 2019 to 2022.

Given the severity of the opioid crisis, addressing the flow of precursors from China is an important component of a whole-of-supply-chain strategy. But it’s also a bargaining chip Xi can trade for U.S. concessions. In exchange for renewed Chinese counternarcotics cooperation, the administration is lifting sanctions on an arm of China’s Ministry of Public Security that the Commerce Department determined was implicated in the repression of Uyghurs and other minority groups. The agreement’s failure to address the role of Chinese money laundering in the drug trade raises concerns about its effectiveness, as do early actions by Chinese officials that merely remind companies about existing Chinese counternarcotics laws. Only time will tell whether loosening U.S. sanctions against Uyghur genocide will be worth Xi’s promise to rein in Chinese pharmaceutical and chemical companies.

Meanwhile, the Mexican president told Biden that he was “sincerely committed” to preventing drug trafficking across the U.S. border, and both leaders reiterated support for their existing working groups and frameworks for addressing the problem. Following AMLO’s meeting with Xi, the Mexican government announced that the Chinese would begin sharing information on shipments of potential precursor chemicals with Mexican authorities.

AMLO’s record on fentanyl, however, does not inspire confidence that these steps will change anything. Despite extensive evidence that criminal groups in Mexico produce most of the fentanyl trafficked into the United States, AMLO said in a March 2023 press conference that “Here, we do not produce fentanyl.” AMLO then sent a letter to Xi asking him to “help [Mexico] control shipments of fentanyl that can be sent from China,” falsely alleging that the fentanyl flowing across the U.S. border was produced in Asia and less than a third was coming through Mexico.

Washington cannot rely on verbal commitments from Beijing and Mexico City alone to address this crisis. The administration’s heavy focus on meetings and joint statements ignores the lack of results on the ground — fentanyl flows into the United States continue to increase, not decrease. From FY2021 to FY2023, annual seizures of fentanyl at the border are up 152 percent. While the administration would point to these seizures as a sign of success, a senior Homeland Security official recently told Congress that intelligence estimates indicate Customs and Border Protection is only seizing one-quarter of the fentanyl coming across the border. This would indicate that rapidly increasing seizures are symptomatic of a crisis spiraling out of control, not a more effective counternarcotics strategy.

Ultimately, stemming the flow of deadly drugs into the United States will require stronger border security, disrupting the chemicals and money that enable the production of these drugs, and degrading the cartels that thrive on impunity in Mexico. These transnational criminal groups will adapt to countermeasures, and so long as they can exploit Mexico’s inability to control significant portions of its territory, fentanyl and whatever new drugs come after will continue to flow north. Despite the high-minded rhetoric at APEC, making real progress through bilateral security cooperation with the Mexicans while holding China accountable for its complicity in the drug trade remains a crucial, yet under-addressed challenge facing the Biden administration and Congress.

Connor Pfeiffer is the executive director of the Forum for American Leadership and a former national security adviser to a member of the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. His handle on X is @ConnorPfeiffer.