China ‘not willing’ to cooperate on fentanyl crisis until institute was removed from blacklist, US official testifies
- Senior US commerce department official says Beijing took ‘concrete actions’ to address the narcotics issue, although too early to see measurable results
- US will appear to have ‘egg on our face’ if China is given what it wanted without getting results ‘Americans deserved in return’: Republican representative
A senior US commerce department official said the IFS had been taken off the blacklist and Beijing had taken “concrete actions” to address the narcotics issue, although it was too early to see measurable results.
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“The US removed IFS from the entity list because it was an impediment to getting China’s cooperation on fentanyl, which is killing over 100,000 Americans every year in all of your districts across the country,” said Matthew Axelrod, assistant secretary for export enforcement at the US Department of Commerce, in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on oversight and accountability.
“We have to do what we can. That does not mean that we are going to trust China’s going to do what they say,” he said.
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But when faced with questions from Republican lawmakers on the effectiveness of the White House’s move, Axelrod said he understood “there have been concrete actions taken by the Chinese government so far” and that has “led to some companies stopping operations”.
“Of course, we will continue to monitor,” he said.
The Institute of Forensic Science was blacklisted in 2020 and restricted from having access to US goods over alleged human rights violations against members of China’s Uygur minority.
After the meeting, the two sides announced they would resume cooperation on counternarcotics, with a focus on reducing the flow of precursor chemicals fuelling illicit fentanyl and synthetic drugs.
Stemming the flow of fentanyl precursors has become a priority for Washington amid a sharp increase in drug overdose deaths. According to a US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report in May, the rate of overdose fatalities involving fentanyl more than tripled from 2016 to 2021.
Commenting on Axelrod’s remarks, Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said Beijing would “conscientiously implement” the consensus reached by both presidents during the San Francisco bilateral meeting and cooperate based on the “principles of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit”.
But Representative Cory Mills, a Republican from Florida, described the “deal with China” as setting a “dangerous precedent” in the US “when a foreign entity says ‘we won’t engage with you unless you do X’”.
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“If, for example, China automatically says that we are going to support you in climate change, that means we just drop Huawei [from the entity list] as well,” he asked.
Thea Rozman Kendler, assistant secretary for export administration at the US commerce department, testified alongside Axelrod on Wednesday and told Republican lawmakers the White House was concerned about both human rights and the fentanyl crisis.
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“When we are talking about the removal of IFS from the entity list, all of these factors came into play in a tough decision,” she said, later adding that deciding who to take off the entity list was made unanimously by the departments of defence, commence, energy and state.
However, the answers offered by the commerce department officials did not please most lawmakers on the panel.
Representative Nathaniel Moran, a Republican from Texas, said the US would look like “we have egg on our face” if Biden has given China what it wanted without getting the results “Americans deserved in return”.
