Vice President-elect JD Vance and Han Zheng spoke about ‘fentanyl, balancing trade, and regional stability,’ the Trump–Vance transition team said.
Vice President-elect JD Vance met with China’s deputy leader Han Zheng on Sunday morning, the Trump–Vance transition team said.
Han, the vice chairman of the Chinese regime and member of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), will attend President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday.
Last month, Trump invited Chinese leader Xi Jinping to attend his inauguration, and the Chinese leader opted to send his deputy instead.
The Trump–Vance transition team said in a statement that Vance had welcomed Han to the United States and to the inauguration.
The pair discussed “a range of topics including fentanyl, balancing trade, and regional stability,” the statement said, without providing details.
Beijing did not issue a statement.
China’s unfair trade practices and the flow of illicitly manufactured fentanyl or fentanyl analogs from China to the United States are two of the most contentious issues between the two countries.
The Biden administration had kept all tariffs that the previous Trump administration had imposed, and added more on China-made products including electric vehicles, semiconductors, and steel.
Trump has also vowed to continue tackling the problems, threatening to impose tariffs of more than 60 percent on Chinese goods, and an additional 10 percent if the Chinese regime doesn’t stop the outflows that create fentanyl.
Since 2013, the drugs have dramatically pushed up the rate of overdose deaths from synthetic opioids in the United States, from 1 death per 100,000 standard population in 2013 to 22.7 per 100,000 standard population in 2022, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, which is under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2022 alone, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl killed 73,838 people in the United States, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
In previous years, fentanyl and precursors of the drug from China were predominantly shipped to the United States in small packages. In recent years, criminals have also begun to use the Pacific Islands as transit points.
By Lily Zhou
