By Antoni Slodkowski and Michael Martina
BEIJING/WASHINGTON, March 19 (Reuters) – China has arrested seven people and subjected 12 more to “criminal compulsory measures” in a campaign targeting traffickers in fentanyl precursor chemicals, state media said on Thursday, but Washington said it wanted to see convictions.
China’s first publication in years of legal action that has led to the arrests of traffickers follows weekend trade talks with the United States to prepare for a leaders summit in Beijing originally planned for the end of the month.
U.S. President Donald Trump has postponed the visit over the Iran war, but said he would take the trip to Asia in “about five or six weeks.”
CAMPAIGN TARGETS SUPPLY CHAIN
The official Xinhua news agency said the campaign in the central province of Hubei targeted the entire supply chain, from production to storage and the export of precursor chemicals, and was launched in December after a directive from the public security ministry.
The agency did not specify what the “criminal compulsory measures” were.
Until now, China has largely issued only industry notices and taken down websites that trade the chemicals.
“While 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 just arrests,” a U.S. official told Reuters in a statement.
The official added that chemical precursors that “supply the narcoterrorists in the Western Hemisphere” still predominantly come from China, leading to the deaths of thousands of Americans every month.
Trump has used tariffs to pressure China to crack down on sellers of chemicals used to make the deadly synthetic opioid, citing Beijing’s inaction to slap 20% duties on Chinese goods after he returned to office last year.
They were halved after he met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, in October, in exchange for China’s pledge to crack down on the fentanyl networks.
The U.S. Supreme Court last month invalidated the use of an emergency statute on which the remaining 10% fentanyl-related tariff relied, but the Trump administration has told Beijing it expected to reimpose equivalent levies under a different law, Reuters has reported.
Chinese officials, however, have defended their record on fentanyl, saying they had taken extensive action to regulate certain precursor chemicals and have accused Washington of using the issue as blackmail.
Xinhua said that “in one notable action based on information provided by U.S. drug enforcement authorities, investigators in Hubei successfully cracked a case involving the sale of state-controlled new psychoactive substances and Category II precursor chemicals for drug manufacturing.”
During the operation, it said the Hubei anti-narcotics commission had “strengthened investigations into illegal activities involving fentanyl precursor chemicals, and enhanced risk-prevention measures related to the sources of such chemicals.”
The fentanyl precursor issue has become a core friction in U.S.-China relations.
The two countries traded barbs at a U.N. drugs meeting this month, with Washington accusing Beijing of failing to stop sales of precursor chemicals for fentanyl and China dismissing the allegation as false while calling the U.S. irresponsible.
(Reporting by Antoni Slodkowski, Shi Bu, Ryan Woo and Michael Martina; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman, Clarence Fernandez, Barbara Lewis, Rod Nickel)
Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Reuters news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.