Under U.S. pressure, the regime banned fentanyl production in 2019, but Chinese companies simply shifted tactics and shipped precursors to Mexico.
China’s ruling regime began a secret project during President Donald Trump’s first term to weaken the United States through scaling up production of fentanyl precursors and shipping them to Mexico and Canada for manufacturing and distribution across the border, according to an insider who has sources in Beijing’s top political circle.
The plan, which the Chinese regime dubbed Project Zero, aims to make Americans addicted, according to Yuan Hongbing, a dissident and jurist living in exile in Australia. His sources are close to the descendants of senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials who choose to remain anonymous due to security concerns.
Top Chinese officials have continued to push fentanyl into the United States, Yuan told The Epoch Times in a recent interview.
Fear of the plan leaking out and contradicting Beijing’s claim that it is being a responsible actor is one reason Beijing has chosen to go head to head with Washington during the current tariff war, Yuan said.
During his first term, Trump pressed CCP leader Xi Jinping to stop the flow of Chinese fentanyl precursors into the United States. However, Xi has repeatedly referred back to another part of Chinese history—the Opium Wars—and blames the West for once turning China into a semi-colonial society.
According to Yuan, Xi has considered the rampant drug abuse in the United States as “retribution” and a clear indicator of the concept Xi envisioned—that the East is on the rise and the West is in decline.
Project Zero was conceived in that spirit, Yuan said.
Drug overdoses, primarily driven by synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, remain among the leading cause of death for American adults aged 18 to 44, and killing more than 107,000 people in 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A January report from Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that supports health care related research, found that the United States has the highest drug overdose death rate in the world.
Yuan taught for eight years at China’s prestigious Peking University in Beijing, and another 10 years at the state-affiliated Guizhou Normal University in southwest China. He maintained connections with those who hold key positions in the Chinese political and legal system, as well as the armed forces.
