White House urges China to impose the death penalty on fentanyl traffickers after the Trump–Xi summit

The White House has revealed that the Trump administration “strongly encouraged” Chinese authorities to execute several of the criminals who produce and distribute the precursor chemicals for illicit fentanyl — a rare request that came after last week’s three-day summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Washington, as the New York Post reports.

“In August 2026, acting on U.S. law-enforcement information, China arrested 21 Chinese nationals for the production and distribution of precursor chemicals to illicit drug producers in North America,” the White House statement after the summit said, as quoted by the New York Post. “The United States strongly encouraged maximum penalties, including the death penalty where applicable.”

Beijing has made other concessions in the drug war too: it imposed new export controls on two precursor chemicals sent to producers in North America and classified orphans — synthetic opioids that can be 10 times more potent than fentanyl — as lethal drugs. Even before Xi’s visit, China had published stricter guidelines for fentanyl-related crimes.

Fentanyl remains one of the deadliest public-health crises in the U.S.: overdose deaths peaked in 2022 with nearly 74,000 victims in a single year, while the latest data show a dramatic decline — 44,564 opioid-overdose deaths in 2025, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). China has long been identified as the main supplier of the precursor chemicals that Mexican cartels use to produce fentanyl, methamphetamine and nitazenes.

Trump had last year imposed a 10% tariff on all Chinese exports citing precisely the concerns over fentanyl precursor chemicals, although the tariffs imposed under the IEEPA Act were struck down by the Supreme Court in February. Last week’s visit was Xi’s first to the White House since 2015 and his first on American soil since 2023. Besides the progress on fentanyl, the summit also brought Trump’s push for China to increase oil refining, the gift of two giant pandas, an artificial-intelligence notification system and tariff relief for around $30 billion in goods.