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 Ten current and former U.S. officials, congressional sources and
China and trade experts told Reuters in interviews that China
cooperates only when it believes it will get something in return.
In this case, several said, Beijing appears to have offered its help
so that it could get the best deal possible from Washington in trade
negotiations.
"Will they enforce this, or is this just another gesture to be used
to secure something they want?" said Robin Cleveland, vice chair of
the congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review
Commission, which monitors the national security impact of bilateral
trade and economic ties.
"I think they would hope to leverage it in some meaningful way in
the context of trade talks," she said.
Those trade talks ran into trouble this week with China backtracking
on earlier commitments to change its laws in key areas, including
intellectual property rights, trade secrets, forced technology
transfers, access to financial services and currency manipulation,
Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing U.S. government and
private-sector sources.
U.S. President Donald Trump responded to China by vowing to raise
tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods from 10 to 25 percent
on Friday.
Unless resolved in a new round of negotiations, the mounting
tensions over trade could derail China's cooperation on fentanyl.
"They are not going to do it, the record says, unless they get a
trade deal, or we threaten them in the absence of a trade deal,"
said Derek Scissors, an expert on Sino-U.S. economic relations at
the American Enterprise Institute think tank.
"They can stop this if they want, but they won't unless they see a
deal."
An explosion in the use of fentanyl, an opioid painkiller 50 times
more potent than heroin, and its analogues has driven the most
devastating chapter of America's long-running opioid crisis, U.S.
law enforcement agencies say, and China accounts for most of the
fentanyl and fentanyl analogues seized.
The United States recorded more than 28,000 synthetic opioid-related
overdose deaths in 2017, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, the majority of them fentanyl-related.
Chinese President Xi Jinping promised Trump at a summit in Argentina
in December that Beijing would crack down on flows of all fentanyl-related
substances.
In April, China pledged that from May 1 it would expand the list of
narcotics subject to state control to the more than 1,400 known
fentanyl analogues, which have a slightly different chemical makeup
but are all addictive and potentially deadly, as well as any new
ones developed in the future.
Fentanyl and all of its analogues are controlled substances subject
to strict regulation in the United States.
Speaking in Beijing on Friday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman
Geng Shuang said China had implemented the change as promised
starting from May 1, a move he said had been positively appraised by
the United States.
"I want to emphasize here that China keeps to its word," he told a
daily news briefing. "At the same time, I would also like to point
out that the root cause of the U.S. fentanyl problem is not in
China."
Asked whether there was a link between China's promised increased
controls on fentanyl and trade talks with the United States, Geng
said: "I don't know what person has such an imagination."
China's Ministry of Public Security, National Health Commission and
National Medical Products Administration – the departments
responsible for the new rules – did not respond to requests for
comment on this story. The White House did not respond to requests
for comment.
The regulatory change is supposed to shut down the operations of
illicit producers and traffickers who advertise and sell fentanyl
products on video websites including Google's YouTube and Vimeo, and
on the Dark Web.
They deliver the drugs to the U.S. market mainly in the mail,
through express delivery services or trans-shipping them through
Mexico and Canada.
Trump hailed the agreement as a major advance in efforts to contain
the opioid epidemic. Some U.S. officials who work directly with
Chinese law enforcement agencies say they believe Beijing is
committed to clamping down.
"We see them as a partner we want to work with to effect that change
of availability here in the U.S.," said Daniel Baldwin, a senior
Drug Enforcement Administration official who was its top
representative in Beijing from 2011-2014.
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The ruling Communist Party's newspaper, the China Daily, covered the
plans to expand the controlled substances list last week under the
headline, "China, U.S. join hands to fight fentanyl."
But even Trump's attorney general, William Barr, has said it is too
soon to claim victory.
"Whether the Chinese ... actually deliver on it from an enforcement
standpoint remains to be seen," Barr testified at a House of
Representatives budget hearing in April.
PAST FAILURES
Beijing has reneged on pacts with Washington before, U.S. experts
say.
In 2017, the bulk of fentanyl seizures by U.S. Customs and Border
Protection came from China, despite an agreement announced in
September 2016 by the Obama administration on "enhanced measures" to
fight trafficking to the United States. China later said it made no
such agreement.
China added fentanyl, 24 analogues and two precursors to its
narcotics control list beginning in 2015, leading to a sharp
reduction in those products. But manufacturers sidestepped the
controls by synthesizing new analogues, some of them even more
potent and deadly than the original.
They will remain legal until China follows through on its promise to
control all forms of fentanyl.
U.S. law enforcement officials worry China will not be able to fully
enforce this new crackdown either, even if it sticks to its promise
to try.
Its oversight of more than an estimated 400,000 producers and
distributors inside vast chemical and pharmaceutical industries is
notoriously weak and enforcement agencies are short of inspectors
and weakened by corruption, the U.S. experts said.
Fentanyl analogues are relatively easy to make and some producers
create front companies to sell fentanyl to traffickers, U.S. experts
say.
Further, experts say, local Communist Party officials are under
pressure to hit targets for economic growth and so are often
reluctant to shut down any growing businesses, including
pharmaceutical firms.
Chinese Customs enforcement appears to be even weaker. Officials
stopped fewer than a half dozen fentanyl-related shipments in
2016-2017 before they could be shipped out of China, according to
Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, a co-chair of the U.S. Senate's
Caucus on International Narcotics Control.
U.S. officials have found Chinese inaction frustrating.
"As sophisticated as China is in their intelligence services, I find
it odd that they can't stem the flow of fentanyl from their
country," Joshua Skule, the FBI deputy executive director for
intelligence, told Reuters before Beijing announced it would control
all fentanyl-related substances.
China has provided the United States with information that aided in
federal indictments of eight Chinese nationals for fentanyl
trafficking since 2017. All of the suspects remain at large in
China, however, according to a U.S. Congressional Research Service
report in December 2018.
"There are many, many laws on Chinese books that don't get enforced.
It will turn out that enforcement is quite spotty," Scissors said.
China's government is committed to making a difference on this case,
however, says Daniel Baldwin, who served as the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration's top representative in Beijing for three
years.
"We see them as a partner we want to work with to effect that change
of availability here in the U.S.," he said.
A bipartisan group of senators has introduced a bill to empower
Trump to sanction Chinese drug makers and others who knowingly sell
synthetic opioids to traffickers. It also would create a commission
to monitor flows of the substances from overseas.
"We have to make sure they keep their word," said Republican Senator
Tom Cotton, a co-sponsor of the legislation.
(Reporting by Jonathan Landay; Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard
in Beijing; Editing by Kieran Murray and Sonya Hepinstall)
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