With China’s economy reeling from weak job growth, a real estate slump, falling investment, and shrinking exports, the CCP has leaned harder on national security and social order. That stance now extends to drug crime, but only selectively. Trafficking that harms Chinese citizens is met with unforgiving severity. But the country’s role as a major exporter of fentanyl precursors to North America is a revealing glimpse into what the CCP chooses to police and what it allows to pass.

Essentially how every dictatorship operates -- if it makes the gov't money it's fine, but if it damages or kills a citizen slave it's bad for the country.

Chinese officialdom has abhorred drugs since the Qing Dynasty, when opium ravaged society and sparked the humiliating Opium Wars.

Anyone with a functioning brain wouldn't want drug trafficking in their country.

Propaganda narratives still invoke opium as part of a “bitter memory” of foreign exploitation.

How is it propaganda when it is clearly foreign exploitation?