The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party will hold a hearing on April 16 regarding the role of China in the fentanyl crisis. 

The hearing, scheduled for 8 a.m. EST, includes testimonies from William P. Barr, who previously served as the United States Attorney General, Ray Donovan, a former Chief of Operations for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and David Luckey, a senior international and defense researcher at RAND Corporation.

In 2018, the U.S. praised China for regulating two common fentanyl precursors that were being purchased by Mexican cartels, used to produce fentanyl, and then brought into the U.S., but after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in August 2022, China refused to discuss taking further action to combat the flow of fentanyl, the Wall Street Journal reported. Rep. David Trone (D-MD), who served as co-chair on a federal commission on opioid trafficking, said all talks about the drug between China and the U.S. State Department and Drug Enforcement Agency have been cut off.

Chinese Spokesman Wang Wenbin said in an August 2022 press briefing, "In disregard of China’s stern warnings and repeated representations, Nancy Pelosi visited China’s Taiwan region" according to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. "This has dealt a heavy blow to the political foundation of China-US relations. The Chinese side announced eight countermeasures including suspending China-US counternarcotics cooperation." 

In November 2023, President Joe Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Xi said China would resume counternarcotics cooperation with the U.S., according to a commentary authored by Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institute.  However, Felbab-Brown said, "It is unlikely that China will end its approach of subordinating its anti-drug and anti-crime cooperation to its strategic calculus."