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 The trio included a father and son indicted in Ohio last year on
charges of producing and smuggling fentanyl and fentanyl-related
substances. The third man was indicted on similar charges in
Mississippi in 2017.
The trafficking operations the three allegedly run "are directly
contributing to the crisis of opioid addiction, overdoses, and death
in the United States," Under Secretary of the Treasury Sigal
Mandelker charged in a statement.
The United States had pressed China to arrest Fujing Zheng and his
father, Guanghua Zheng, and Xiaobing Yan since their indictments.
However, all three and five other Chinese citizens indicted in the
United States for fentanyl trafficking have remained free, according
to a U.S. Congressional Research Service report last December.
The United States is in the middle of a major trade war and other
serious disputes with China, making it uncertain whether the
Treasury Department action would have any impact on Beijing. Some
experts believe any crackdown by Beijing will depend on meaningful
progress toward resolving the trade war.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, tapped by Trump to oversee
efforts to fight the opioid crisis, told reporters the
administration would "continue to name and shame and prosecute and
punish people who are peddling their poison into our kids and into
our communities."
The three men sanctioned on Wednesday were designated as foreign
drug kingpins by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign
Assets Control under a law that freezes any property they control in
the United States and bars American citizens from doing business
with those properties.
The three also face penalties ranging from civil fines of up to $1.1
million per violation to more serious criminal penalties, the
Treasury Department said in a statement.
Fentanyl is a cheap, relatively easy-to-synthesize opioid painkiller
50 times more potent than heroin that has played a major role in the
devastating U.S. opioid crisis. Fentanyl and all of its analogues
are controlled substances subject to strict regulation in the United
States.
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More than 28,000 synthetic opioid-related overdose deaths, mostly
from fentanyl-related substances, were recorded in 2017, according
to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
U.S. officials say China is the main source of illicit fentanyl and
fentanyl-related substances that are trafficked into the United
States, much of it through international mail. Beijing denies that
most of the illicit fentanyl entering the United States originates
in China.
The Treasury Department action came three weeks after Trump accused
Chinese President Xi Jinping of failing to meet his promises to
crack down on the deluge of fentanyl and fentanyl analogues flowing
into the United States.
China fired back at Trump, calling his charge "blatant slander" and
saying Beijing has made "unprecedented efforts" to halt illicit
fentanyl production and trafficking.
Xi last December told Trump he would act. China announced a May 1
expansion of state controls to include the more than 1,400 known
fentanyl analogues, and new ones developed in the future. Analogues
have slightly different chemical makeups, but all are addictive and
potentially deadly.
Speaking in Beijing on Thursday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman
Geng Shuang said China and the United States were cooperating on the
anti-narcotics front, and had communicated on specific cases. He did
not elaborate.
(Reporting by Jonathan Landay and Lisa Lambert; Additional reporting
by Ben Blanchard in BEIJING; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
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