U.S. officials are reportedly weighing a Chinese proposal that would see Washington lift its sanctions on a Chinese police institute involved in human-rights abuses in exchange for a resumption of cooperation with Beijing on efforts to counter fentanyl trafficking.
There’s no indication that the Biden administration has decided to lift the sanctions, or even the extent to which that’s being debated internally, but news of the deliberations follows a raft of conciliatory steps that U.S. officials have taken to jump-start high-level dialogue with Beijing.
Chinese officials told the Biden administration that Beijing would only work with the U.S. on narcotics after the reversal of Trump-era sanctions on the Chinese police institute, the Wall Street Journal reported this morning. According to the paper, they have made this demand “for months,” arguing that the 2019 restrictions prevent the institute from purchasing U.S. equipment that it needs for investigations.
Then, last month, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised the possibility of setting up a “working group” on preventing the export of fentanyl precursors, Chinese officials again demanded that Washington first remove the sanctions, per the report.
The measure in question targets the Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science. The Commerce Department added it to the U.S. export blacklist in May 2020, alleging that it was involved in carrying out atrocities against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.
The Journal’s report does not identify the officials involved in the administration’s conversations about potentially lifting the sanctions, only attributing the information to “people familiar with the matter.” And State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told the newspaper that members of Blinken’s delegation never offered to lift, or consider lifting, the sanctions, during the meetings in Beijing. But he did not deny that there are conversations about whether to do so.
Sanctions punishing Chinese Communist Party figures and entities implicated in the atrocities against Uyghurs have become a major flashpoint in the Biden administration’s efforts to seek a détente with Beijing.
In the months leading up to Blinken’s trip to Beijing, deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman ordered the State Department’s in-house China cell to delay sanctions targeting Chinese officials implicated in the Uyghur atrocities — which the U.S. considers a genocide. According to Reuters, Sherman has slow-walked the sanctions to ensure that Blinken would be able to make the trip.
Another senior State Department official, Daniel Kritenbrink, was grilled about the delayed sanctions last week during an appearance before the House Select Committee on the CCP. During that hearing, he claimed that the Biden administration had taken unprecedented steps to counter Beijing’s malign activities.
But asked multiple times by Representative Mike Gallagher, the panel’s chairman, if he had ever advised Blinken or Sherman to delay the sanctions, Kritenbrink repeatedly declined to answer the question directly. “I’m not in a position to comment,” he said at one point. Later in the hearing, Kritenbrink claimed that the department “made no concessions” to secure the Beijing meetings.
“Waiving sanctions on genocide perpetrators to get China’s help on fentanyl is ludicrous. The Biden administration isn’t even pretending to compete with the CCP at this point. Senior administration officials can opine about ‘unprecedented’ steps to hold Beijing accountable all they want, but their actions tell a different story,” Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow in Indo-Pacific Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, told National Review.
“Engagement is back, and America is worse off for it,” he added.
Beijing has also withheld military-to-military dialogue with U.S. military officials, demanding that the Biden administration first reverse sanctions the U.S. placed on defense minister Li Shangfu in 2018. The U.S. has said it will not remove the sanctions, however, and Blinken defended them in an interview on CNN yesterday.
“As a practical matter, those sanctions don’t prevent the minister from engaging or us engaging with him, so there’s no practical impediment. It is a political decision, in effect, for China to decide whether or not he should be engaged,” Blinken said.