Sen. Cruz urges Trump administration to block China’s next UN power play

By Ben Evansky

Sen. Ted Cruz is calling on the Trump administration to block China from installing a controversial former head of the Hong Kong police force at the helm of a United Nations office meant to fight drug trafficking, organized crime and corruption.
China’s candidate Andy Tsang-Wai-hung was nominated by Beijing earlier this summer to be the next executive director of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 

His candidacy, critics warn, marks yet another sign of China’s growing influence at the world body.
The annual budget of the organization for the year is around a quarter-billion dollars. 

Texas Republican Sen. Cruz -- who has sponsored legislation to halt Chinese infiltration on U.S. campuses and research institutions -- told Fox News in a statement that such Chinese efforts need to be stymied.
"The Chinese Communist Party has systematically pursued a policy of joining and exploiting international organizations to advance their agenda. The pattern is the same across issues as varied as the WTO, Internet governance, Interpol, and human rights bodies,” he said.
The Texas senator who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called on the administration to make sure Beijing is halted in its ambitions.
“The UN has no business putting yet another Communist Party cutout in a leadership position, especially one with a direct history of advancing China's abuses in Hong Kong. The Trump administration should use its voice and vote to block this appointment."
As Hong Kong police chief in 2014, Tsang was responsible for putting down pro-democracy protesters who demanded democratic elections for chief executive. 

More recently he served as China’s deputy director for its narcotics control commission.
Gordon Chang, a China expert, told Fox News that Tsang was “known to be a hardliner” when he ran the Hong Kong police.
“[He] headed the police in 2014 when the police used tear gas during the Occupy protests," Chang said. 

"The use of tear gas reignited the protests as ordinary citizens immediately turned off their televisions and took to the streets to show their indignation. Tsang, whether he made the decision to use tear gas or merely followed the orders of Chief Executive C. Y. Leung, was held responsible for one of the worst moves during that time.”
Chang also noted Tsang’s current position. 

“Any candidate proposed for a drug enforcement post by a one-party state behind some of the world's most dangerous drug networks should be rejected out of hand.” 

He said Tsang did not stop China's fentanyl rings “even though he had all the tools of a semi-totalitarian state at his disposal.”
He asked: “Is he really going to be more effective because he would move to Vienna? This would be a hideous appointment.”
China in recent years has become the second-largest contributor to the U.N. after the U.S., and has sought to widen its sphere of influence. 

It now runs four out of 15 U.N. specialized agencies.
A State Department official recently stated to Fox News that the U.S. was not retreating from the U.N. and said the administration was well aware of China’s ambitions.
“China’s concerted push has more to do with advancing its self-serving interests and authoritarian model than demonstrating genuine leadership consistent with the principles and fundamental freedoms enshrined in the U.N Charter,” the official said.
And while some diplomats at the U.N. feel Tsang’s candidacy is unlikely to result in another win for China, the government's U.N. engagement is on full display all the same.
A Heritage Foundation report titled, “How the U.S. Should Address Rising Influences at the United Nations,” authored by senior research fellow Brett Schaefer, noted China’s rise at the U.N. is “not a recent phenomenon.” 

The claim runs against news reports that assert China’s ascension is due to the Trump administration's pullback from the world body.
The report also said the U.S. should “focus its effort and resources on countering Chinese influence, advancing U.S. policy preferences, and increasing employment of U.S. nationals, particularly in senior positions, in those organizations whose remit affects key U.S. interests.”
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is expected to announce his pick for the Vienna job in the coming months.

Chemical Genocide

China’s chemical war on America

By Betsy McCaughey

President Trump got slammed by China for escalating his economic war with China on Friday. 

But for Americans who have lost a family member or friend to the Chinese-made street drug fentanyl, President Trump’s pivot is the right move.
He hiked tariffs on Chinese goods, labeled Xi Jinping an “enemy” and told US companies manufacturing in China to pull out. 

Wall Street went into a tailspin, and partisans called President Trump “unhinged.”
By Monday, President Trump changed his tone, in response to overtures from Beijing. 

But the reality is that harsh words and economic threats are what’s needed. 

China has been waging chemical war against Americans for several years, flooding our neighborhoods with poison.
In the last three years alone, fentanyl and similar synthetic opioids manufactured in Chinese labs have killed some 79,000 Americans. 

That’s more than the American combatants killed in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined. 

And like those combatants, most fentanyl victims are young.
Chinese-made narcotics started showing up on our streets in 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Each year, overdose deaths soared, but the Obama administration never confronted China to stop its deadly assault.
President Trump is fighting back. 

Instead of soldiers and bullets, he is using tariffs and other economic sanctions. 

“We’re losing thousands of people to fentanyl,” Trump tweeted. 

“This is more important than anything else that we’re working on.”
President Trump explained on Friday that China’s refusal to curb the flood of fentanyl is a major reason for the tariff hikes. 

Outraged by the tens of thousands of deaths caused by Chinese-made fentanyl, President Trump tweeted “Xi Jinping said this would stop — it didn’t.”
In fact, China is refusing to ­cooperate with US law enforcement. 

Federal authorities have indicted three Chinese drug kingpins who manufacture fentanyl and fentanyl ingredients and market the lethal drugs over the internet to Americans. 

China won’t ­extradite the accused to America and instead is allowing them to continue to operate freely.
President Trump’s critics, like pro-China Bryce Pardo of RAND Corporation, claim getting tough with China is futile, because China doesn’t have the ­inspectors and law enforcement to shut the poison factories. 

That’s nonsense. 

A country with the brutal totalitarian apparatus to enforce a one-child policy — which China did for years, dictating what went on in the bedroom — can control what gets sold on the internet and put in the mail. 

China’s synthetic opioid factories typically employ hundreds of people seated at internet terminals, openly selling their lethal wares.
The Obama administration, and many Democrats even now, insist the right strategy is to fund drug-treatment programs and expand Medicaid, curbing the demand for killer street drugs instead of cutting off the supply.
Actually, we need to do both — attack the supplier and treat the addicts. 

In war, you don’t stop fighting the enemy while you are bandaging the wounded.
For years, the United States Postal Service has been the Chinese drug dealers’ shipping method of choice. 

The feds did nothing until Congress passed a law in 2018 requiring that every package from China be labeled with the content and origin. 

Still, only about 100 of the 1.3 million ­international packages coming in every day actually get inspected by Customs and Border Protection. 

Friday, President Trump tweeted: “Ordering all carriers to SEARCH FOR AND REFUSE all deliveries of fentanyl from China.” 

A daunting task.
Some of the Chinese fentanyl supplies are actually shipped to Mexico, then smuggled across the southern border to the United States. 

Inspecting packages at that border for fentanyl, a congressional report concluded, is like “finding a needle in a haystack.”
President Trump knows that stopping the drugs on our border is less likely to succeed than stopping China from sending them.
Meanwhile, Monday morning President Trump announced that Chinese officials had called their US counterparts Sunday night and said, “Let’s get back to the table.”
Will President Trump’s hard-line stance on trade stop the drug massacre on America’s streets? 

It’s possible. 

President Trump said Monday morning, ­reflecting on China’s change of tone, that the Chinese “understand how life works.”

Here are the reasons for President Trump's war with China

On Friday the US president ordered companies to halt business with the “enemy” Xi Jinping

By Dominic Rushe in New York

Even by President Trump’s standards his Twitter rant attacking China on Friday was extraordinary. 

In a series of outbursts President Trump “hereby ordered” US companies to stop doing business with China, accused the country of killing 100,000 Americans a year with imported fentanyl and stealing hundred of billions in intellectual property.
The attack marked a new low in Sino-US relations and looks certain to escalate a trade war already worrying investors, manufacturers and economists.
Not so long ago President Trump called Chinese dictator Xi Jinping “a good friend”. 

Now Xi is an “enemy”. 

How did we get here?

China, China, China
On the campaign trail President Trump railed against China, accusing it of pulling off “the greatest theft in the history of the world” and “raping” the US economy.

President Trump repeated the word China so often it spawned a viral video of him saying it over and over again. 

The attacks were a hit with voters and helped get him elected. 

He has continued lambasting China – to cheers – at rallies ever since.
His main beef? 

The trade deficit.

Trade deficit
The US imported a record $539.5bn in goods from China in 2018 and sold the Chinese $120.3bn in return. 

The difference between those two numbers – $419.2bn – is the trade deficit.
That deficit has been growing for years as manufacturing has shifted to low-cost China and it explains the hollowing out of US manufacturing.

For President Trump, and especially for his adviser Pr. Peter Navarro, who once described China as “the planet’s most efficient assassin”, trade deficits represent an existential threat to US jobs and national security. 

China makes up the largest part of the US trade deficit but those fears are also behind his disputes with the EU, Canada and Mexico.

His pro-Beijing detractors argue these deficit worries are hyperbole and a result of the US’s stronger economy, which allows consumers to buy goods at cheaper prices.
While it’s true that unemployment is at record lows and consumers continue to prop up the economy, manufacturing jobs have been lost and with them wage growth.
But it is not just deficits that concerns Trump.

Thieves
China has a deserved reputation for intellectual property theft. 

On Friday, President Trump estimated China robs the US of “hundreds of billions” a year in ideas.

In March, a CNBC poll found one in five US corporations had intellectual property stolen from them within the last year by China.
According to the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, the theft costs $600bn a year.

Beijing bucks
Like Tesla, Nio, a Chinese electric vehicle (EV) company, is suffering as subsidies for EVs are phased out. 

Unlike Tesla, Nio has Xi. 

China is pumping $1.5bn into the company to keep it on the road, the latest in a series of handouts that are unfair.
Cheap steel and aluminium, subsidized by the Chinese government, are the origins of this trade dispute. 

According to the White House, last year alone China dumped and unfairly subsidized goods including steel wheels, tool chests and cabinets and rubber bands on to the US market.

Currency manipulator
Earlier this month the US officially accused China of manipulating its currency “to gain unfair competitive advantage in international trade”.
It was the first time since 1994 that such a complaint has been made official and comes as the dollar has strengthened against world currencies. 

The dispute adds another layer of tension to a complex situation.
China disputed the charge accusing the US of “deliberately destroying international order” with “unilateralism and protectionism”.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is on China’s side, arguing the devaluation of the yuan is largely in line with worsening economic conditions in China.

What happens next?
The US has now slapped billions of dollars on tariffs on Chinese goods. 

China retaliated, again, on Friday with more levies on US goods. 

China’s economic growth has slowed to levels unseen since 1992; US economic forecasts have also been cut.

So far US consumers have not felt the pinch but JP Morgan estimates the average US household will end up paying $1,000 a year for goods if the latest set of tariffs go through.

The unanswerable question is whether any of this will sway President Trump. 

If the President continues to see a war with China as the necessary price to Make America Great Again, then the answer is probably no.

Dies iræ

Trade war explodes as President Trump clashes with US firms over order to abandon China, block fentanyl shipments

By Alex Pappas


President Trump's trade war with China boiled over Friday as Beijing slapped retaliatory tariffs on America and the president declared he's ordering U.S. companies to prepare to leave the country and relocate back home.
"Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing ... your companies HOME and making your products in the USA," Trump tweeted in a blistering set of statements Friday morning. 

The president went on to call on companies to “search for & refuse” shipments of the opioid painkiller fentanyl from China.


Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump· 5h
Our Country has lost, stupidly, Trillions of Dollars with China over many years. They have stolen our Intellectual Property at a rate of Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year, & they want to continue. I won’t let that happen! We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far....


Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
.... better off without them. The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP. Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing..
32.2K
4:59 PM - Aug 23, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
21K people are talking about this
The U.S. has said it plans to impose 10 percent tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese goods in two steps, on Sept. 1 and Dec. 15. 

China responded Friday with new tariffs on $75 billion of U.S. products in retaliation, deepening a conflict over trade and technology.
But as Trump rejects such warnings while keeping his foot on the gas in the clash with China, American businesses responded to his latest guidance by urging continued trade talks.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a statement saying it wants to see continued "constructive engagement" with China.

President Trump, meanwhile, pressured major shipping companies to block fentanyl from China.
"I am ordering all carriers, including Fed Ex, Amazon, UPS and the Post Office, to SEARCH FOR & REFUSE all deliveries of Fentanyl from China (or anywhere else!)," Trump tweeted Friday.


Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
· 5h
Replying to @realDonaldTrump
.... your companies HOME and making your products in the USA. I will be responding to China’s Tariffs this afternoon. This is a GREAT opportunity for the United States. Also, I am ordering all carriers, including Fed Ex, Amazon, UPS and the Post Office, to SEARCH FOR & REFUSE,....


Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
.... all deliveries of Fentanyl from China (or anywhere else!). Fentanyl kills 100,000 Americans a year. President Xi said this would stop -- it didn’t. Our Economy, because of our gains in the last 2 1/2 years, is MUCH larger than that of China. We will keep it that way!
57.3K
4:59 PM - Aug 23, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
25.2K people are talking about this
China added fentanyl products to the country's list of narcotics subject to state control after Xi Jinping met with President Trump in December 2018, but the White House says it has not seen substantial action on blocking major shipments.
But the shipping companies suggested they're already doing what they can.
FedEx and UPS both said in statements they already work to identify and remove illegal shipments.
“FedEx already has extensive security measures in place to prevent the use of our networks for illegal purposes. We follow the laws and regulations everywhere we do business and have a long history of close cooperation with authorities,” the company said.
“UPS takes a multi-layered approach to security and compliance to identify and prevent delivery of illegal Fentanyl and other illicit substances as well as any other attempts of noncompliant shipments,” the shipping business said.
Stocks fell sharply on Wall Street after Trump’s comments. The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank more than 600 points Friday.
The stocks of all three companies the president mentioned also dropped as traders tried to understand what the implications for them were.
Meanwhile, President Trump also lashed out at the Federal Reserve after its chairman, Jerome Powell, stopped short of saying the U.S. central bank is prepared to cut interest rates for a second time this year.
In a tweet, President Trump compared Powell -- whom he’s repeatedly criticized, despite hand-picking him almost two years ago -- to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
“As usual, the Fed did NOTHING!” Trump tweeted, initially misspelling Powell’s last name before changing it. 

“My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powel or Chairman Xi?”


Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump· 5h
As usual, the Fed did NOTHING! It is incredible that they can “speak” without knowing or asking what I am doing, which will be announced shortly. We have a very strong dollar and a very weak Fed. I will work “brilliantly” with both, and the U.S. will do great...


Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
... My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?
36.2K
4:57 PM - Aug 23, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
26.2K people are talking about this
His tweet came shortly after Powell gave a speech at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium in Wyoming in which he promised policymakers will “act as appropriate” to sustain the record economic expansion. 

The economic outlook, Powell said, remains strong, despite uncertainties resulting from the U.S.-China trade war, slowing global growth and muted inflation.
Stocks had been wavering between gains and losses earlier after China said it would retaliate against the latest round of tariffs imposed by Washington with duties on $75 billion of U.S. products.
China said Friday that it will also increase import duties on U.S.-made autos and auto parts. 

The retaliation pulled global markets into negative territory.

MAGA

President Trump Says U.S. Will Hit China With More Tariffs

By Alan Rappeport


WASHINGTON — President Trump, frustrated by increasingly fruitless negotiations with China, said Thursday that the United States would impose a 10 percent tariff on an additional $300 billion worth of Chinese imports next month, an escalation in a trade war that has dragged on for more than a year.
The new tariff would come on top of the 25 percent levy that Mr. Trump has already imposed on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports, resulting in the United States taxing nearly everything China sends to the United States, from iPhones to New Balance sneakers to children’s books.
Mr. Trump had agreed in June not to impose more tariffs after meeting with the Chinese dictator, Xi Jinping, and agreeing to restart trade talks. 

But Mr. Trump said he was moving ahead with the levies as of Sept. 1 as punishment for China’s failure to live up to its commitments, including buying more American agricultural products and stemming the flow of fentanyl into the United States.
“Until such time as there is a deal, we’ll be taxing them,” Mr. Trump told reporters on the White House lawn.

On the sidelines of a meeting of Southeast Asian officials in Bangkok on Friday, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, told reporters that “adding tariffs is definitely not the correct way to resolve economic and trade frictions.”
New tariffs would increase the likelihood that the two enemies will be locked in a protracted trade war for months, if not years. 

While the countries continue to negotiate, the path to a deal has only narrowed as Beijing and Washington harden their positions and as political dynamics, including the 2020 election, further complicate the chances for a compromise.
The United States has insisted that China buy more farm goods and agree to cement certain changes into Chinese law. 

Beijing has resisted codifying any changes into law and has said it will only enter into a deal that is mutually beneficial. 

Both sides seem increasingly confident they can wait out the trade war indefinitely.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump’s building frustration with the grinding pace of the negotiations boiled over.
“We thought we had a deal with China three months ago, but sadly, China decided to re-negotiate the deal prior to signing,” Mr. Trump said on Twitter. 

“More recently, China agreed to buy agricultural product from the U.S. in large quantities, but did not do so.”

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

Our representatives have just returned from China where they had constructive talks having to do with a future Trade Deal. We thought we had a deal with China three months ago, but sadly, China decided to re-negotiate the deal prior to signing. More recently, China agreed to...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2019

The president said that China also did not fulfill its commitment to stop the sale of fentanyl into the United States.
As he departed the White House for a rally in Ohio, Mr. Trump accused Xi Jinping of trying to slow-walk negotiations ahead of the 2020 election in the hopes that a Democrat would win the White House.
“I think he wants to make a deal, but frankly he’s not going fast enough,” Mr. Trump said. 

“He said he was going to be buying from our farmers, he didn’t do that. He said he was going to stop fentanyl from coming into our country, he didn’t do that.”
He added that the tariffs could be raised to 25 percent or higher if the talks continue to falter, but allowed that they could also be removed.
The stock market reacted negatively to Mr. Trump’s comments. 

The S&P 500 had been up 1 percent shortly before 1 p.m., with strong gains seen among technology companies such as semiconductor makers. 

But the market tumbled sharply after the threat to impose the new tariffs appeared on Twitter. 

The drop erased all the day’s gains and more, sending the benchmark stock index into the red. 

Shortly before 2 p.m., the S&P 500 was down about 1.1 percent. 

It closed down 0.9 percent, led by drops in the energy and financial sectors, both of which fell more than 2 percent.
Oil prices, which are sensitive to global growth concerns, also fell sharply.
The slump continued in Asia on Friday morning, with markets in Japan and Hong Kong down more than 2 percent. 

Futures markets were predicting that Wall Street would open lower on Friday, too.
The decision came one day after the president’s top advisers returned from two days of trade talks with their Chinese counterparts in Shanghai. 

There were few signs of real progress, and both sides released perfunctory statements when the meetings concluded, saying there would be additional discussions in Washington next month.
Talks have been complicated by the recent emergence of Zhong Shan, China’s commerce minister, as a lead negotiator for the Chinese, according to a person familiar with the discussions. 

Zhong’s role has signaled to some in the Trump administration that the hard-liners in China are winning the debate over the reformers, such as Vice Premier Liu He, who are more open to making structural economic changes that the United States wants.
After little of substance was accomplished during the talks in Shanghai this week, officials in the Trump administration grew increasingly wary that China is retreating to its pattern of using mixed messages and delays to wait out Mr. Trump.
Before the talks even began, Mr. Trump took to Twitter to berate China for failing to buy American farm goods and to play down the potential for a deal before the election.
For more than a year, negotiators from the United States and China have been shuttling back and forth to discuss a trade agreement that Mr. Trump has described as potentially the largest transaction in history. 

The United States has been pushing China to open its markets to American businesses, respect American intellectual property, buy more American agricultural products and stop manipulating its currency. 

After an agreement appeared close last spring, talks collapsed after Beijing refused to certain demands and Mr. Trump accused China of breaking the deal.
Mr. Trump and Xi agreed to restart negotiations after meeting at the Group of 20 summit in Japan in June. 

Mr. Trump said he would postpone tariffs on another $300 billion worth of imports and allow American companies to continue selling some technology to a Chinese telecom giant, Huawei, that had been placed on a government blacklist.
In return, Mr. Trump said that China had agreed to “immediately” begin buying American farm products, like soybeans. 

But those purchases have yet to happen.
China has been preparing to make agricultural purchases, and on Sunday the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that millions of tons of American soybeans had been shipped to China. 

But elsewhere, Chinese officials have continued to insist that they are not making purchases as a condition of the talks. 

On Wednesday, Xinhua characterized China’s agreement to buy more American farm products as being “according to its own domestic needs and favorable conditions to be offered by the U.S. side for the purchase.”
While Mr. Trump described the 10 percent tariff as “small,” it will further compound economic damage from his long-running trade war. 

Unlike his previous tariffs, this round would hit a broad swath of consumer products and could dampen consumer spending at time when economic growth has already begun to cool.
On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates in part because of the spat with China, which threatens to crimp the economic expansion. 

Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said the quarter-point cut, the Fed’s first since the depths of the 2008 financial crisis, was “intended to ensure against downside risks from weak global growth and trade tensions.” 

Mr. Powell said that Mr. Trump’s trade fights “do seem to be having a significant effect on financial market conditions and the economy.”
Markets, which had pulled back their expectations for future rate cuts on Wednesday, moved toward pricing in two more reductions by year-end following Mr. Trump’s decision.
“Tariff Man is alive and well,” said Michael Pillsbury, a China scholar at the Hudson Institute who advises Mr. Trump.
Mr. Pillsbury said that officials from China had miscalculated their belief that Mr. Trump had lost his appetite for the trade war.
After Democratic presidential candidates took to the debate stage this week to criticize Mr. Trump’s China policy and muse about the possibility of returning to the Trans-Pacific Partnership to corral China, the president demonstrated that he would not be deterred from using more tariffs as his negotiating tool of choice.
“President Trump is essentially confirming the seemingly inevitable escalation of the trade war that seems in prospect, given the gulf in negotiating positions and the broken trust between Chinese and U.S. negotiators,” said Eswar Prasad, the former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division. 

“Both sides now are settling in for a broad and unremitting trade war that will last at least through this term of Trump’s presidency.”
Caught in the middle are businesses and consumers, who are being pinched by the tariffs through higher costs and retaliatory punishment. 

Farmers, in particular, have been hurt as Beijing has slowed its purchases of farm products.
Because many more goods flow from China to the United States than in the other direction, China has not been willing or able to match Mr. Trump’s tariffs dollar for dollar. 

But company executives say the Chinese government has used other painful methods to retaliate against them — surprise inspections, rejections for licenses, and China’s move to roll out a list of “unreliable entities” that Beijing has threatened to take action against.

The additional tariffs would hit a wide range of products, including toys, electronics, sporting goods, household appliances, books and food.
An administration official said that the office would soon finalize the list of Chinese products that will face new tariffs. 

Business groups are bracing for the worst.

Despite the additional tariffs, Mr. Trump said that the trade talks between the United States and China in Shanghai this week were “constructive” and that he looked forward to more “positive dialogue” between the countries.
A delegation from China was scheduled to come to Washington for more trade talks next month, but it is not clear if the new tariffs will change those plans.

Rogue Nation

Systematic aggression by Chinese against our people, our business and jobs has rendered them unworthy of our trust.
By Charles Wallace

Copper plates move along a conveyor at the Jinguan Copper smelter, operated by Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group Co., in Tongling, Anhui province, China, on Thursday, Jan. 17, 2019. On the heels of record refined copper output last year, China's No. 2 producer, Tongling, says it'll defy economic gloom and strive to churn out even more of the metal in 2019. 

Tyler Cowan, an economist whom I normally greatly admire, has come out with his diagnosis of what ails the US-China relationship. 

It’s not trade, he says, but a “lack of trust.”
This has to qualify as an understatement of epic proportions. 

Here are just a few issues of note:

1. After joining the World Trade Organization in 2000, China heavily subsidized state-owned companies in the steel sector with the goal of taking over the world steel industry. It largely succeeded, despite having neither raw materials or a cheap labor way of making steel. The major price advantage was that it gave their steel companies free electricity with which to price US and European steel companies out of the market, in direct violation of WTO rules.
2. China has been feverishly building man-made islands in the South China Sea with the goal of vastly expanding its territory and threatening any country that has the temerity to believe in international waters and the law of the sea. Just ask Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines if there is a "lack of trust" over the Spratly Islands.
3. Chinese drug factories are cranking out tons of cheap fentanyl, a drug 10 times more potent than heroin, and using the US mails to distribute them to dealers in the US. Does anyone really think that China, which after all is still a closely controlled police state, doesn’t know who is doing this and could easily stop them?
4. Chinese army hackers are stealing not military secrets from the US, but private company information and turning it over to Chinese firms so that they can achieve a commercial advantage over foreign competitors. Now, I’m sure the US military does try to penetrate China’s military secrets, at least I hope they do. But I seriously doubt that the National Security Agency is helping Apple by stealing plans for the next Xiaomi.
5. China’s industrial policy known as “Made in China 2025” contains a prescription for taking over the global chip industry in the same way it has seized the steel industry. State owned companies will be sent out to buy up every Western firm they can get their hands on. Is it any wonder that the new US committee looking at these purchases is taking a dim view of them?
6. China is depending on the thousands of Chinese engineers who trained at US universities, which really have never dealt with a systemized program of economic warfare before. US universities were friendly, open and helpful to their Chinese students, as they should be, but they will find that this knowledge is being turned against the US with the goal of destroying key US industries. Did anyone mention artificial intelligence research?

Faced with the laundry list of aggressive behavior, it just plain silly to call this a “lack of trust.”
To his credit President Trump has been very vocal about what China was trying to do and has put in place trade restrictions in an effort to force Beijing to accept international standards for trade and navigation in the oceans, for starters.
The measures have had some effect -- China’s economy has slowed dramatically, not entirely due to tariffs from the US, but the taxes have begun to bite.
While China is often described as a market economy, consider this: shortly after Beijing put retaliatory tariffs on soybeans, Chinese imports of US soybeans went nearly to zero. 

Was this in reaction to a 10% tax, or did the government spread the word that US soybeans were not to be imported. 

I suspect the latter, which demonstrates that the term market economy really doesn‘t apply to a one-party system with no respect for the rule of law.
So my answer to Professor Cowan: it’s not a lack of trust but systematic aggression by China against our people, our business and jobs that has rendered them unworthy of our trust.
I hope the current round of negotiations will help restore that trust by curbing that aggression, but I seriously doubt it.

Fentanyl War: China's Empty Promises

Trump Says China Will Curtail Fentanyl. The U.S. Has Heard That Before.
By Sui-Lee Wee

Fentanyl seized at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. United States officials cite China as the main source of illicit fentanyl brought into America.

BEIJING — China vows to stem the supply of the powerful opioid fentanyl flowing into the United States. 

It pledges to target exports of fentanyl-related substances bound for the United States that are prohibited there, while sharing information with American law-enforcement authorities.
Such empty promises, echoed in the recent meeting between the countries’ presidents, ring familiar.
They first emerged in September 2016, when the Obama administration said China and the United States had agreed on “enhanced measures”meant to keep fentanyl from coming into the United States. 

But in its official statements or state media reports made at the time, the Chinese government never specified the steps it intended to take, and its follow-up has been patchy at best.
So when the Trump administration said on Saturday that Xi Jinping had agreed to designate fentanyl as a controlled substance in “a wonderful humanitarian gesture,” analysts said there was little to cheer about.
“It’s in many ways all theater from the White House and very little serious substance,” said John Collins, executive director of the International Drug Policy Unit at the London School of Economics. 

“It seems to me the same story again.”
China is the main source of illicit fentanyl in the United States, where it helped drive total overdose deaths last year to more than 70,000 — a record. 

The assertion was supported by a report last month by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which Congress created to monitor relations between the countries.
Cracking down on the manufacturing and distribution of fentanyl in China is no easy task. 

As Mr. Collins noted, many classes of the drug are already considered controlled substances in the country. 

Fentanyl’s chemical structure and those of related analogues can be modified to create similar yet distinct substances, so new versions can be concocted quickly.
Because of fentanyl’s potency and the ease with which it can be produced, one kilogram bought for $3,000 to $5,000 in China can potentially kill 500,000 people, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The Trump administration said that Xi’s announcement meant that people selling fentanyl to American buyers and shipping it into the United States would “be subject to China’s maximum penalty under the law”: the death penalty. 

China did not specify the punishment for violating the new ban, but anyone guilty of trafficking in controlled substances is subject to capital punishment.
The United States has long pushed China to systemically control all fentanyl substances. 

China’s approach has been to ban chemicals one by one, and only after getting evidence for why it should do so from the other countries and the United Nations.
The lag has allowed Chinese makers of illicit drugs to create new fentanyl derivatives faster than they can be controlled.

A pharmacy technician preparing syringes of fentanyl in a hospital. Although the powerful opioid has legitimate medical uses, it is also a major cause of addiction and overdose deaths.

China has said it would label 25 fentanyl substances and two precursors — the chemical ingredients that can be used to make the drug — controlled substances.

Jeremy Douglas, the regional representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said “right now, there’s nothing stopping a pharmaceutical company or supplier from selling related but noncontrolled substances.”

He said he had clarified the announcement’s meaning with a senior official in Beijing, who told him that China would need to amend its laws before the full ban could take effect.
That process might take months, assuming China proceeds. 

As with other points of contention between the two countries, the problem for Washington is getting Beijing to fulfill its eternal promises.
Complicating the matter is the size of China’s chemical industry. 

State Department data shows that there are about 160,000 chemical companies in China. 

Weak regulation means that those producing fentanyl substances will probably still be willing to sell them despite the new ban.
“China controls the majority of global fentanyl sales, so it is a thriving industry there,” said Jeffrey Higgins, a retired special supervisory agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration. 

“There are economic incentives for the Chinese to let opioid production flourish and fewer incentives to restrict their economy to cooperate with foreign law enforcement. We will have to wait and see how much the Chinese government cracks down on fentanyl producers.”
There is also little awareness in China that the United States has an opioid problem, or that China is contributing to it.
During an informal meeting about health care cooperation in Virginia last month, American officials told senior officials from the China Food and Drug Administration and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention about America’s fentanyl problem.
Chen Xi, an assistant professor of public health at Yale University who was there, said the Chinese officials said that “they had never heard of this.”

Destroying the U.S.: China's Biochemical Weapons

China is the major source of fentanyl and illegal drugs
BBC News
China has one of the largest chemical industries in the world
Amid tension between China and the US over trade, there's also friction over another issue -- the illegal trade in synthetic drugs.
Factory-produced opioids -- powerful painkillers increasingly abused by US citizens -- are being made in China and sold from there too.
One of the main ones is fentanyl -- 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine -- which is only approved in the US for severe pain arising in cases like treatment for cancer.
President Trump has called out China publicly.
A senior Chinese official, Yu Haibin of the National Narcotics Control Commission, said the growing drug demand in the US as the real problem.

Dangerous chemicals
These Chinese synthetic drugs are cheap to make, are sold on the internet and sent to the US by post, either directly or via trafficking networks in Mexico.
On arrival at their destination they can be mixed in very small amounts with other drugs, especially heroin, to increase their potency.
"Fentanyl is lethal, even at very low levels. Ingestion of doses as small as 0.25mg can be fatal," states the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
It's also relatively easy to alter its chemical structure to produce similar substances -- known as fentanyl analogues -- to bypass legal controls.
"The countless possibilities to create new compounds by small changes in chemical structures pose a growing challenge to international control of the opioid trade," states the UN Office for Drugs and Crime.

The US authorities are increasingly worried about opioid abuse, and have now put all fentanyl-related products into the most dangerous class of drugs.
In testimony before Congress, Assistant Secretary of State Kirsten Madison described the situation as the most "severe drug crisis" the US has ever faced.

She said that in 2017, more than 40% of the 72,000 drug overdose deaths in the US involved Chinese synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
Health statistics from Canada show that last year, 72% of deaths related to opioid abuse were believed to involve fentanyl or related substances -- up from 55% in 2016.
Europe's drug monitoring agency the EMCDDA, which covers the EU plus Turkey and Norway, said in a report this year that "the number of Chinese synthetic opioids has grown rapidly in Europe since the first substance was reported in 2009".

US officials are unequivocal that China is the main source for fentanyl and similar drugs.
In October 2017, the US authorities announced the first ever indictments against two Chinese individuals for conspiracy "to distribute large quantities" of fentanyl as well as other opioids.

The US authorities say Chinese drugs are being shipped by mail

Katherine Pfaff, spokesperson for the US Drug Enforcement Agency, told the BBC that interceptions from the US postal system, information from people on the ground, and tracking cyber footprints, leads them to believe a "significant amount" comes from China.
The European drug monitoring agency report states: "It appears that most shipments of new fentanyls coming into Europe originate from companies based in China."

Regulation and corruption
But do the Chinese have a problem regulating their large and rapidly growing pharmaceutical industry?
Drugs policy expert at the Rand Corporation in the US, Bryce Pardo, describes their regulatory capacity as "limited".
"Gaps in regulatory design, the division of responsibility between provincial and central governments, and lack of oversight and government and corporate accountability, increase opportunities for corruption," he says.

"I think it is fair to say that a lack of regulatory capacity, perhaps regardless of the letter of the law, certainly limits their ability to control the industry," says John Collins, head of the International Drug Policy Institute at the London School of Economics (LSE).

Poisoning the World

Chinese Are Getting Opioids Into the U.S. Through the Postal Service
By DESMOND BUTLER AND ERIKA KINETZ

United States Postal Service workers sort packages at the Lincoln Park carriers annex in Chicago, Illinois on Nov. 29, 2012.

WASHINGTON — Congressional investigators said Wednesday that Chinese opioid manufacturers are exploiting weak screening at the U.S. Postal Service to ship large quantities of illegal drugs to American dealers.
In a yearlong probe , Senate investigators found that Chinese sellers, who openly market opioids such as fentanyl to U.S. buyers, are pushing delivery through the U.S. postal system. 

The sellers are taking advantage of a failure by the postal service to fully implement an electronic data system that would help authorities identify suspicious shipments.
At a time of massive growth in postal shipments from China due to e-commerce, the investigators found that the postal system received the electronic data on just over a third of all international packages, making more than 300 million packages in 2017 much harder to screen. 

Data in the Senate report shows no significant improvement during 2017 despite the urgency.
The U.S. Postal Service said it has made dramatic progress in the last year in total packages with opioids seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“The Postal Service will continue to work tirelessly to address this serious societal issue,” spokesman David Partenheimer said in a statement.
He said implementing the use of electronic data is slowed by the need to negotiate with international partners, but the service is making progress.
The Senate probe matches many of the findings of a 2016 investigation by The Associated Press that detailed unchecked production in China of some of the world’s most dangerous drugs.
AP reporters found multiple sellers willing to ship carfentanil — an opioid used as an elephant tranquilizer that is so potent it has been considered a chemical weapon. 

The sellers also offered advice on how to evade screening by U.S. authorities.
Researchers on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations also contacted Chinese sellers directly. 

The sellers preferred payment in Bitcoin.
Investigators traced the online sellers to seven U.S. opioid deaths and 18 drug arrests. 

The Senate has cleared the report to be handed over to law enforcement.
In one case, the investigators traced orders from an online seller in China to a Michigan man who wired $200 in November 2016. 

The next month he received a package from someone identified by the investigators as a Pennsylvania-based distributor. 

A day later, the Michigan man died of an overdose from drugs, including a chemical similar to fentanyl.
The huge influx of opioids has led to a wave of overdose deaths across the U.S. in recent years. Republican Sen. Rob Portman, the subcommittee’s chairman, noted that fentanyl now kills more people in his home state than heroin.
“The federal government can, and must, act to shore up our defenses against this deadly drug and help save lives,” he said.

Chinese Peril

Chinese indicted on illegal drug manufacturing
By Sadie Gurman

Drug Enforcement Administration Acting Administrator Robert Patterson, center, accompanied by Royal Canadian Mounted Police Assistant Commissioner Joanne Grace Crampton, left, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, right, speaks at a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2017, to announce the indictments of two Chinese fentanyl trackers in the fight against opiate substances from entering the United States.

WASHINGTON — Two Chinese nationals have been indicted on charges they manufactured tons of fentanyl and other powerful narcotics that were then peddled in the United States, killing at least four people and seriously injuring five others, Justice Department officials announced Tuesday.
Authorities said the men controlled one of the most prolific Chinese drug-trafficking organizations, but with no extradition treaty with China, the chances are slim they will ever be brought to the U.S. to face the charges.
The men, who are not in custody, are accused of separately running chemical labs in China that produced the drug and other illegal opioids for sale online to Americans who were often unaware of its potency and susceptible to overdose. 

At least 21 other people were also indicted on charges they trafficked the drugs across the U.S. and Canada, often through the U.S. mail.
The announcement comes as the Trump administration suffered a setback in its efforts to call attention to the nation’s drug crisis. 

Its nominee to be the nation’s drug czar withdrew Tuesday from consideration following reports that he played a key role in weakening the federal government’s authority to stop companies from distributing opioids.
It also comes amid growing pressure on Donald Trump to fulfill his pledge to declare the nation’s opioid epidemic a “national emergency,” as a commission he’s convened on the subject has urged him to do. 

An initial report from the commission in July noted that the approximate 142 deaths each day from drug overdoses mean the death toll is “equal to September 11th every three weeks.”
A sign of White House interest in the issue, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway quietly attended Tuesday’s news conference at the Justice Department.
Robert W. Patterson, acting administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said the Chinese case represents “one of the most significant drug threats facing the country” because they were able to produce a wide array of synthetic drugs and hide their tracks with web-based sales, international shipments and digital currencies like bitcoin.
The Chinese men indicted were Xiaobang Yan, 40, and Jian Zhang, 38, who worked separately but similarly, authorities said.
Yan, who operated at least two chemical plants in China that were capable of producing tons of fentanyl, would monitor drug legislation and law enforcement actions in the U.S., changing the chemical structure of his drugs to avoid prosecution, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said. A 2013 traffic stop in Mississippi unearthed a domestic drug ring linked to Yan.
Zhang, along with five Canadians, two people from Florida and New Jersey man, were indicted in North Dakota for conspiracy to import the drugs from Canada and China. 

Prosecutors say Zhang ran at least four labs and sold the drug to American customers online. Investigators became aware of him after police officers responded to a deadly overdose in Grand Forks, North Dakota and traced the supply chain, officials said.
Rosenstein, who discussed the problem with Chinese officials last week during a high-level dialogue on law enforcement and cybersecurity, would not say whether the labs have been shut down. 

He said he was hopeful Chinese authorities would hold the men accountable.
Federal authorities are increasingly warning of the dangers of fentanyl, which can be lethal even in small amounts and is often laced with other dangerous drugs. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that more than 20,000 Americans were killed by the drug and its analogues in 2016, and the number is rising, Rosenstein said.

Chemical warfare: Death by China

China Is Fueling a Drug War Against the US
BY MIKE RIGGS
Despite what you may have heard about Mexico and its cartels, the global drug war's biggest Whac-A-Mole hole for nearly two decades has been China.
The bath salts and "spice" that dominated American drug headlines in recent years? Those came from Chinese chemical factories.
The Mexican cartels that have made most of our meth since regulators snuffed out America's artisanal speed industry?

They buy their precursor chemicals from China.
Nearly every synthetic drug you can buy in the U.S. — legally or illegally, from cathinones to steroids to the heart medication your doctor prescribed — came from China.
And if it wasn't made in China, it was made in India, which is a good place to make illegal things for the same reasons: It's massive, loosely regulated, increasingly population-dense, and home to hundreds of millions of people looking to turn a buck.
In what is now becoming a full-fledged drug reporting genre, MSNBC published a short video from Jacob Soboroff explaining just how easy it is to order fentanyl—a growing cause of overdose deaths in the U.S.—through Chinese websites accessible on the open internet:

Deadly opioid fentanyl is being ordered online & shipped direct to USA from China. Here's how. #OneNationOverDosed https://t.co/6cpSL3ZVj9

— Jacob Soboroff (@jacobsoboroff) August 9, 2017

In a New York Times piece from 2015, reporter Dan Levin did something similar, calling up a Chinese chemical factory and running through an incomplete list of drugs available for purchase through Chinese websites: spice, bath salts, precursors for meth, the stimulant "flakka" (remember when that was popular for 10 minutes or so?), and an entire universe of "research chemicals" that mimic banned substances but technically aren't illegal.
"We're seeing cases nationwide and ground zero always seems to be China," an assistant district attorney from New York told Levin.
On top of that, a 2016 study from the Office of the US Trade Representative reported that 97 percent of the counterfeit prescription drugs intercepted at U.S. points of entry came from China.
Soboroff seems genuinely shocked that it's so easy to order drugs this way.
I will confess to also being rather surprised when a Chinese chemical factory representative reached out to me after Reason published my recent feature on steroids.
The rep sent me links to a reddit thread featuring reviews of his factory and a list of illegal compounds they could make in whatever quantity I desired. 
He also offered to send me free samples and guaranteed free re-shipping in the event my package was intercepted by U.S. Customs. (I did not take him up on his offer.)
A few of the underground lab operators I've spoken to here in the U.S. say that ordering from China is a relatively safe, hassle-free, and common way to do business.
Many nutritional supplement companies, meanwhile, order their research chemicals from vendors on Alibaba, which is like the Chinese version of Amazon, if Amazon were also a B2B hub.
This is the 21st century drug trade.
Global supply chains work nearly as well for illegal goods as they do for legal ones. 
Research chemists are producing very effective analogs faster than anyone can regulate them.
The sheer import volume of first-world countries all but guarantees vast amount of banned goods will escape detection.
We will hear more in the coming months and possibly years about the threat posed by drug makers in China.
Law enforcement bodies will claim they're taking the necessary steps to curtail the practice.
The U.S. Justice Department, meanwhile, has asked the U.S. Sentencing Commission to rewrite federal sentencing guidelines in such a way that prosecutors would no longer be tasked with explaining the relationship between a banned compound and a grey market analog.
The current process, the Justice Department wrote in a July 31 letter, "is cumbersome, inefficient, and resource-intensive. It turns sentencing hearings into lengthy chemistry and pharmacology lectures, often complete with dueling experts."
The department is asking the Sentencing Commission to adopt a "class approach" that would allow judges to forgo determining a synthetic drug's potency and harm relative to a banned substance, and simply to treat all similar analogs the same.
None of these maneuvers will drastically change the landscape.
"Even if you could stop all manufacture of these substances in China today, there is a chance that someone in the U.S. or Canada could pick up the manufacturing," a U.N. synthetic drug expert told STAT News last year.
The Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, can't keep up with U.S. supplement manufacturers who are incorporating Chinese-made research chemicals into their product lines.
The agency's latest target is an anabolic steroid mimetic called ostarine.
The effective dose for that drug is roughly 5 milligrams; it goes for about $2 a gram on Alibaba.
By the time the FDA has sent letters to every person selling Ostarine in the U.S., manufacturers and consumers will have moved on to the next thing.
This is how global markets work, and they will only get faster and more complex.

China's new weapon of mass annihilation: fentanyl

Synthetic-drug scourge in U.S. starts in Chinese secret labs
By BY DAVID OVALLE

FBI agents crime lab specialists in HAZMAT suits prepare to enter the suspected carfentanil dealers home with a search warrant. The house is suspected of being a synthetic heroin drug lab on Friday, December 2, 2016

Captain Tony Milan-EMS Battalion Commander for City of Miami Fire Rescue, upper right, works on an overdose victim with his crew on Thursday November 17, 2017. The victim is suspected of a heroin/fentanyl overdose.

Hand-out images of suspected heroin found by Miami-dade police during a bust operation called Dragon Slayer in the Cutler Ridge area on Thursday December 15, 2016. 

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article130158314.html#storylink=cpy

China’s pharmaceutical industry is to blame for the epidemic of deadly fentanyl and similar drugs being shipped to Florida and other states, a federal government report concluded Wednesday.
The findings are not new — the growing problem of Chinese synthetic drugs was highlighted in the Miami Herald’s 2015 Pipeline China series — but underscore the challenges of curbing the opioid-addiction wave that has hit South Florida and communities across the country.
The report noted that even though China has "cooperated" with the American government to ban some versions of the potent drug commonly dubbed “synthetic heroin,” new versions are constantly concocted in clandestine labs before unknown quantities make their way to North America.
“Because illicit fentanyl is not widely used in China, authorities place little emphasis on controlling its production and export,” according to the report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
The report’s release comes the same week as fentanyl and heroin were discussed at the first meeting of Miami-Dade’s Opioid Task Force, made up of elected leaders, law-enforcement officers and health officials looking for solutions to curb the crisis. 

The increase in the death toll has been staggering, the task force heard Monday.

There were at least 162 confirmed deaths related to fentanyl and its synthetic cousins in Miami-Dade, plus another 82 suspected cases that are awaiting final toxicology testing. 

In total, that’s a 208 percent increase from last year, according to the Medical Examiner’s office.
“More people are dying from this problem and this addiction than car accidents in Miami-Dade,” county Mayor Carlos Gimenez told the task force. 

“More people are dying of opioid addiction than of murders.”
Miami-Dade prosecutor Howard Rosen, who oversees narcotics investigations and is a member of the task force, said addicts seeking a high are willing to risk the danger.
“In law enforcement, we’re told the dealers sometimes use it as a marketing tool, implying their product is so good it can kill,” Rosen said.
The effects of fentanyl and its variants have been widely chronicled, devastating communities across the continent and in Florida, where a crackdown on prescription painkillers such as Oxycodone is believed to have led to the spike in heroin and fentanyl abuse.

Fentanyl, which is used legally as a surgical painkiller but is now more prevalent on the streets in its illegal Chinese-made form, can be 50 times more potent than heroin. 

There’s an even deadlier version wreaking havoc on Miami-Dade streets: carfentenil, a drug that is normally only used to tranquilize elephants and large animals.
Overdose deaths have hit every part of Miami-Dade, although the impoverished Overtown neighborhood has been particularly hard hit — it is also believed to be the go-to hub for sales of the illegal opioids.
In South Florida, the growing epidemic has ramped up law-enforcement efforts as the trade has created a new breed of drug dealers who use the internet to order synthetic narcotics from easily accessible Chinese websites. 

The drugs are sent to the United States or Mexico in packages deliberately mislabeled to avoid detection.
“Avoiding detection has become so simple that Chinese narcotics distributors will guarantee customers a second shipment if the first is seized by law enforcement,” Wednesday’s report said.
The maze of corruption and haphazard government regulations for chemicals and pharmaceuticals in China means the United States is effectively hamstrung, the report noted. 

“Bureaucratic infighting can prevent the Chinese government from carrying out precise and effective counternarcotics operations,” the report said.

Trump push to combat drug trade means starting with China, not Mexico

By Andrew O'Reilly 

If President Trump wants to fulfill his campaign promise of stemming the flow of drugs coming across the United States’ border with Mexico, he may want to start by looking at China.
Manufacturers and organized crime groups in the world’s most populous country are responsible for the majority of fentanyl -- the synthetic opioid that is 50 times more potent than heroin -- that ends up in the U.S. and the majority of precursor chemicals used by Mexican drug cartels to make methamphetamine, according to numerous published U.S. government reports.
“The Mexican cartels are buying large quantities of fentanyl from China,” Barbara Carreno, a spokesperson with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), told FoxNews.com. 

“It’s much easier to produce than waiting around to grow poppies for heroin and it’s incredibly profitable.
The DEA estimates that a kilogram of fentanyl, which sells for between $2,500 and $5,000 in China, can be sold to wholesale drug dealers in the U.S. for as much as $1.5 million and that the demand for the drug due to the prescription opioid crisis in places like New England and the Midwest have kept the prices high.

What is fentanyl

• Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, 50 times more potent than heroin, that's responsible for a recent surge in overdose deaths in some parts of the country. It also has legitimate medical uses.
• Doctors prescribe fentanyl for cancer patients with tolerance to other narcotics, because of the risk of abuse, overdose and addiction, the Food and Drug Administration imposes tight restrictions on fentanyl; it is classified as a Schedule II controlled substance.
• The DEA issued a nationwide alert about fentanyl overdose in March 2015. More than 700 fentanyl-related overdose deaths were reported to the DEA in late 2013 and 2014. Since many coroners and state crime labs don't routinely test for fentanyl, the actual number of overdoses is probably much higher.

Trump, along with numerous other presidential hopefuls, promised while on the stump in states hard-hit by drug addiction to quickly tackle the widespread use of drugs like fentanyl and heroin. 

While heroin addiction has been a concern for decades, in recent years the number of users of heroin and fentanyl -- and its more potent derivatives like carfentanil -- has skyrocketed as the government clamps down on the abuse of prescription opioids like OxyContin and Percocet.
"We're going to build that wall and we're going to stop that heroin from pouring in and we're going to stop the poison of the youth," Trump said during a September campaign stop in New Hampshire.
The problem with cracking down on fentanyl and its derivatives is that while these substances may be banned in the U.S., they may not be illegal in their country of origin. 

China, for example, only last year added 116 synthetic drugs to its controlled substances list, but failed to include carfentanil – a drug that is 10,000 times more potent than morphine and has been researched as a chemical weapon by the U.S., U.K., Russia, Israel, China, the Czech Republic and India.
“It can kill you if just a few grains gets absorbed through the skin,” Carreno said.
While Mexican cartels obtain these substances in large quantities through the murky backwaters of the Chinese black market, anybody with a credit card and Internet access can call one of the numerous companies in China’s freewheeling pharmaceutical industry that manufactures fentanyl and its more potent cousins.
Earlier this year, The Associated Press found at least 12 Chinese businesses that said they would export carfentanil to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium and Australia for as little as $2,750 a kilogram.
Besides synthetic opioids, Chinese companies are also producing massive amounts of the precursor chemicals used to make methamphetamine.
As the methamphetamine industry evolved over the last decade or so from small, homegrown operations in the U.S. to the super-labs run by Mexican cartels, cooks and producers of the drug have begun to rely more and more on China for their ingredients. 

Mexico now supplies 90 percent of the methamphetamine found in the U.S., and 80 percent of precursor chemicals used in Mexican meth come from China, according to a study by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
“China is the major source for precursor chemicals going to Mexico,” David Shirk, a global fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told FoxNews.com. 

“The problem is finding who the connection is between organized crime groups in China and organized crime groups in Mexico.”
Shirk added that law enforcement and drug war experts generally have a good picture of the major players in Mexican organized crime, but the Chinese underworld is less well mapped and it is more difficult to pin down the major players in the drug trade there.
Despite U.S. efforts to crackdown on both the fentanyl and methamphetamine trades, U.S. government officials acknowledge that much of the onus lies with the Chinese. 

A U.S. State Department report found that drug-related corruption among local and lower-level Chinese officials continues to be a concern.
When he takes office in January, Trump has a few things working in his favor in respect to combatting the drug trade.
One is the continued fracturing of some of Mexico’s largest and most powerful drug cartels. 

The Sinaloa Cartel, for example, was seen for years as an impenetrable drug organization until cracks began to appear in its armor following the re-arrest earlier this year of its leader, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and the power struggle that ensued.
“When the violence goes up, business always goes down,” Shirk said.

Poisoning The World

Chemical Weapon for Sale: China's Carfentanil
By ERIKA KINETZ AND DESMOND BUTLER

A member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police opens a printer ink bottle containing the opioid carfentanil imported from China, in Vancouver, June 27, 2016.

The United States government is concerned that carfentanil, a powerful opioid that has caused a rash of overdose deaths, could be used as a chemical weapon and has discussed the matter with China, the State Department said Friday in response to an Associated Press investigation.
"Agents like carfentanil could be used in lethal doses that would make them comparable to traditional nerve agents, raising concerns that they could be used as chemical weapons," a State Department official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.
U.S. officials addressed the issue with their Chinese counterparts at the G-20 summit of world leaders in September, and again last week at a scheduled meeting on law enforcement cooperation, the official said.
The AP identified 12 Chinese vendors willing to export carfentanil to the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium and Australia, in quantities that could kill millions of people, no questions asked.
"We can supply carfentanil ... for sure," a saleswoman from Jilin Tely Import and Export Co. wrote in broken English in a September email.
"And it's one of our hot sales product."
Carfentanil is so toxic an amount smaller than a poppy seed can kill a person, but it is not a controlled substance in China.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is also pressing China to blacklist carfentanil, but Beijing has yet to act, leaving a substance whose lethal qualities have been compared with Venomous Agent X, or VX, to flow unabated into foreign markets.
The AP did not actually buy any drugs, or test whether the substances on offer were genuine.
China's Ministry of Public Security did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Carfentanil is 100 times more powerful than fentanyl, a related drug that itself is up to 50 times stronger than heroin.
Carfentanil's only routine use is as an anesthetic for elephants and other large animals.
It burst into view this summer as the latest scourge in an epidemic of opioid abuse that has killed tens of thousands in the U.S. alone.
Since July, there have been 19 deaths related to carfentanil in just the Detroit area, local health officials said Thursday.
On Friday, Canadian health officials announced that carfentanil was found in the bodies of two young men who took lethal overdoses of the drug.
China is the primary source of fentanyls and fentanyl precursors that end up in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, according to a July DEA intelligence brief.
Even as China's carfentanil manufacturers operate openly, efforts to tighten control of fentanyls under the Chemical Weapons Convention are intensifying.
Carfentanil and chemicals like it are already banned from the battlefield under the convention, which came into force in 1997.
Now 24 countries, including Australia, the U.S., Canada and Switzerland, are pushing for discussion on whether the convention could be used to block their use for domestic law enforcement as well.
"We believe these chemicals pose a serious challenge for the convention," the states said in a joint statement in December.
The letter noted "inherent safety risks that include potential long-term health effects."
For decades before being discovered by drug dealers, carfentanil and substances like it were researched as chemical weapons by the U.S., U.K., Russia, Israel, China, the Czech Republic and India, according to publicly available documents.
"It's a weapon," said Andrew Weber, assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs from 2009 to 2014.
"Companies shouldn't be just sending it to anybody."
Forms of fentanyl are suspected in an unsuccessful 1997 attempt by Mossad agents to kill a Hamas leader in Jordan, and were used to lethal effect by Russian forces against Chechen separatists who took hundreds of hostages at a Moscow theater in 2002.
The theater siege prompted the U.S. to develop strategies to counter carfentanil's potential use as a tool of war or terrorism, said Weber.
"Countries that we are concerned about were interested in using it for offensive purposes," he said. "We are also concerned that groups like ISIS could order it commercially."
More recently, dealers discovered that vast profits could be made by cutting fentanyls into illicit drugs.
In fiscal year 2014, U.S. authorities seized just 3.7 kilograms (8.1 pounds) of fentanyl.
This fiscal year, through just mid-July, they seized 134.1 kilograms (295 pounds), Customs and Border Protection data show.
Overdose rates have been skyrocketing.
Delegations of top Chinese and U.S. drug enforcement officials met in August and September to discuss opioids, but failed to produce a substantive announcement on carfentanil.
U.S. lawmakers are also looking for ways of cracking down on illegal imports — though it is unlikely Congress will pass any legislation this year.
Rep. Daniel Donovan, Jr., a Republican from New York, introduced a bill recently that would increase sentences for traffickers of opioids, including carfentanil.
It would also give the DEA power to issue emergency orders to classify new synthetic drugs for higher penalties.
In a statement, Donovan cited the AP investigation.
"We have to get fentanyl and its variants -- especially carfentanil -- and its traffickers off the streets immediately," Donovan said.
"They are, quite literally, killing people every day."
Last October, China added 116 synthetic drugs to its controlled substances list.
Acetylfentanyl, a weak fentanyl variant, was among them.
Several vendors contacted in September were willing to export carfentanil but refused to provide the far less potent acetylfentanyl.
Seven companies, however, offered to sell acetylfentanyl despite the ban.
Five offered fentanyl and two offered alpha-PVP, commonly known as flakka, which are also controlled substances in China.
Several vendors recommended shipping by EMS, the express mail service of state-owned China Postal Express & Logistics Co.
"EMS is a little slow than Fedex or DHL but very safe, more than 99% pass rate," a Yuntu Chemical Co. representative wrote in an email.
EMS declined comment.
A Yuntu representative hung up the phone when contacted by the AP and did not reply to emails.
Soon after, the company's website vanished.