Republican lawmakers criticise lifting of US sanctions to gain China’s help on fentanyl
- As part of a Biden-Xi summit deal, the US lifted curbs on a Chinese agency deemed complicit in human rights violations in an effort to stem flow of opioids
- ‘Sometimes we make trade-offs to protect our national security,’ a US Commerce Department official said in justifying the decision
Republican lawmakers in Washington expressed dissatisfaction on Wednesday with what they called the Biden administration’s “diplomacy from a position of weakness” in efforts to halt the flow of fentanyl from China to the United States.
The criticism came after US State and Commerce Department officials acknowledged that lifting sanctions on a division of China’s Ministry of Public Security was a “trade-off” aimed at securing Beijing’s cooperation on fentanyl.
During a hearing of the House Subcommittee on the Indo-Pacific, Representative Andy Barr, a Republican from Kentucky, questioned witnesses from both departments about the removal of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science (IFS) from the list of entities sanctioned by the Commerce Department.
The IFS was originally sanctioned in 2020 for allegedly engaging in “activities contrary to the interests of the United States”. When announcing the restrictions, the Commerce Department accused the institution of being “complicit in human rights violations and abuses committed in China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, forced labour and hi-tech surveillance against Uygurs, ethnic Kazakhs and other members of Muslim minority groups … in Xinjiang”.
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The sanctions were lifted in November after the summit between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping in northern California, when the Chinese leader pledged to join bilateral efforts to curb illegal fentanyl exports to the US.