By Paul Martin
On June 4, 1989, Chinese government tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square and killed an unknown number of their own citizens. The Chinese Communist Party has never acknowledged how many died. It has never apologized. It has never allowed a public accounting. The massacre became, by official decree, something that did not happen.
Thirty-seven years later, the method has changed but the human rights abuses remain.
Since 2015, approximately 500,000 Americans have died from fentanyl poisoning. Most were young—fentanyl is the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 45. Over 10 high school students die every week.
A bipartisan House committee—the China Select Committee—released its findings in April 2024. The report is detailed and damning. The CCP directly subsidizes the manufacturing and export of illicit fentanyl through tax rebates. It has given grants and awards to companies openly trafficking synthetic narcotics. It holds ownership interests in companies tied to drug trafficking. It fails to prosecute fentanyl manufacturers. It allows the open sale of fentanyl precursors on China’s tightly monitored internet—while censoring content about domestic drug sales. Export-focused narcotics content is largely left untouched.
Human rights groups, including the United Nations, have documented the CCP’s abuses of Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and Christians inside China—torture, forced sterilization, denial of medical care, starvation. Foreign policy experts from both parties believe these abuses don’t stop at China’s borders. The fentanyl crisis, they argue, is the CCP’s proxy war against the United States—asymmetric, deniable, and devastatingly effective.
Consider what that means. Every year the DEA seizes tens of million fentanyl pills and thousands of pounds of fentanyl powder inside the United States. A single blue pill costs about what a can of cheap beer costs. Estimates place more than half a billion such pills on American streets today.
When I think about Tiananmen, I think about what it reveals: a government willing to kill, willing to lie, and willing to wait out the world’s outrage.
The deaths in Tiananmen Square were sudden. The deaths from fentanyl are slower—one family at a time, one funeral at a time. But the author is the same. A government that will massacre its own citizens in a public square, then pretend it never happened, will absolutely poison another country’s children while having the strictest of laws to protect its own.
We must name this what it is. Not a trade dispute. And not merely a public health crisis.
It’s a form of warfare.
Because an ideology that would murder its own citizens would have no trouble murdering those of its chief adversary.
