President Donald Trump’s trip to Beijing this week gives him an opportunity to deliver results in an area that is important to his supporters: limiting China’s role in the American fentanyl crisis. This is reported by Politico.
Fentanyl — together with trade, artificial intelligence and the Iran conflict — is one of the most important items on Trump’s agenda during his long-awaited two-day summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, according to a government official granted anonymity.
Since his first term, Trump has prioritised pressuring China to take measures to curb the flow of chemical precursors from China to Mexican cartels that process them into fentanyl.
The number of deaths resulting from overdoses in the United States has fallen sharply since the peak three years ago. Nevertheless, nearly 40,000 people died from synthetic opioids, which include fentanyl, in 2025, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But Trump will likely encounter a wall of denial and empty rhetoric rather than serious measures to curb the flow of chemical precursors from China to Mexican cartels that refine them into fentanyl, according to four former American government officials and experts on China’s narcotics industry.
The United States has previously accused a Chinese network of “underground banks” of having helped Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa drug cartel with money laundering and other criminal activity.
Nevertheless, there are political reasons for Trump to continue pressing the issue. The President’s supporters claim that he has already proved that he can hold Xi accountable.
“President Trump has made it clear that he holds Xi Jinping and China accountable for fuelling the fentanyl crisis, and he has made accountability a top priority,” said Representative John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Select Committee on China, which in 2024 gathered evidence showing that Beijing encouraged Chinese chemical companies to produce and export precursor chemicals to Mexico.
China wishes to be removed from the U.S. State Department’s annual list of “major illicit drug transit or producing countries”, which is due to be updated in September. Inclusion on the list subjects Beijing to increased scrutiny from American authorities and places China in the same category as Afghanistan, Burma and Venezuela.
Trump’s challenge is to secure genuine commitments, said Elaine Dezenski, former member of the Chairman’s Council on China Competition at the Export-Import Bank of the United States.
“If we had a magic wand and could obtain any concession from Beijing on fentanyl, it would be in the form of cooperation in going after the Chinese banks involved in [precursor chemical] transactions,” Dezenski believes. “Who is helping the money-laundering networks on the Chinese side?”
Trump has pressed Xi to be more aggressive towards fentanyl producers, including by urging China to introduce the death penalty for people convicted of sending the product to the United States.
“Although we are encouraged by China’s first public enforcement actions since the leaders met in Busan in October, we are focused on achieving results. We want to see seizures and convictions, not merely arrests,” the government official said. “This is a supply problem that is killing thousands of Americans every month.”
The fight against fentanyl has been an important part of Trump’s political profile since he ran for president in 2016 and used campaign rallies in New Hampshire and other key electoral districts to promise an end to the opioid epidemic. He declared overdoses from the substance to be a public health emergency in 2017 and made China synonymous with the fentanyl scourge by accusing Beijing of what he called its “outrageous” role as supplier.
That message has resonated with voters whose lives and communities have been devastated by the substance, where annual deaths resulting from overdoses peaked at around 74,000 in 2022.
Politico writes that Peking has repeatedly denied any complicity in the American fentanyl crisis, but has over the past six years responded to pressure from the United States with regulatory measures aimed at countering the export of fentanyl.