China’s chemical exports are behind a ‘tsunami’ of meth flooding Asia
MAE SAI, Thailand — The shipment of chemicals from China was meant to stay near Bangkok. But a tracker, planted by Thai drug authorities based on a tip from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, showed it moving north toward the porous 1,500-mile-long border with Myanmar.
Thai anti-narcotics officers believed the chemicals would be used to synthesize methamphetamine, a highly addictive stimulant flooding countries across the Asia-Pacific region. And they knew that on the other side of the border, in jungled hills ruled by China-backed warlords, was what the United Nations considered the biggest meth production hub in the world.
The problem — which had paralyzed investigators repeatedly in the past, they recounted — was that their mandate was to interdict illegal drugs, not the ingredients that could make them.
The tracker eventually blinked at a warehouse minutes from the crossing to Myanmar. At the Office of the Narcotics Control Board headquarters in Bangkok, leaders issued a command to the personnel on the border: Raid the warehouse.
A Washington Post investigation has found that Chinese manufacturers are shipping rapidly increasing amounts of chemicals that can be used in the production of synthetic drugs to lawless parts of Southeast Asia, where warlords and criminal gangs have been producing and trafficking record levels of meth.
This trade, which underpins a surging drug crisis across the Asia-Pacific, has expanded in part because authorities in China are not meeting international standards to prevent such flows or heeding the appeals of other governments to rein in criminal elements embedded in its colossal chemicals industry, according to documents obtained by The Post.
“China supercharged this sector,” said John Coyne, a former Australian police official now serving as director of the national security program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Industrial production of meth out of Southeast Asia “would not have been possible” without Chinese industry and organized crime, he added.
The Post’s investigation draws on intelligence documents from governments in the Asia-Pacific region, law enforcement briefings, customs records and photographic evidence of chemical seizures, as well as interviews with more than 40 people involved in or monitoring drug flows. It found striking and largely unreported similarities between the situations in the Asia-Pacific and the Americas, where collaboration between Latin American cartels and their Chinese suppliers has been at the core of the fentanyl crisis.
Some of the Chinese companies indicted or put under sanctions by the United States in the selling of chemicals needed to make fentanyl are the same entities U.S. agencies have identified as suppliers of meth ingredients to Myanmar, said U.S. law enforcement officials in Southeast Asia, sharing information that has not been publicly reported before. “There is clear, concrete linkage to show that this really is one big global fight,” said one official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he had not been authorized to share details of ongoing investigations.
President Donald Trump cited China’s trade in these chemicals, known as drug precursors, as a rationale for his first rounds of tariffs this year, alleging in an executive order that the Chinese Communist Party has “subsidized and otherwise incentivized” their export, while providing “safe haven” to manufacturers and brokers involved in the industry.
At a summit with Trump in late October, Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed to crack down on illicit shipments of fentanyl precursors, although analysts are skeptical there will be meaningful change. Beijing has previously rejected claims that it bears responsibility for drug crises abroad and argued that authorities have already subjected drug precursors to tighter regulations. China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
But investigators from U.S. law enforcement agencies, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and private intelligence and risk management firms have found mounting evidence to show that organized crime networks in Southeast Asia have been able to easily sidestep Chinese controls and continue sourcing base ingredients from partners in China.
Investigators say they have found dozens of licensed companies in China openly trading ingredients for meth precursors like ephedrine and pseudoephedrine on online marketplaces. These companies offer end-to-end logistics support, including evasion from customs regimes, and have faced limited, if any, penalties from Chinese authorities even when exposed as precursor suppliers, investigators say.
The “tsunami of methamphetamine” inundating Asia is “directly fueled by precursor chemicals from Chinese companies,” said Brandon Yoder, former deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.
Officials from the U.N. and other multilateral organizations have warned Southeast Asian governments that Chinese manufacturers are “the most important source by a wide margin” of precursor chemicals streaming into Myanmar — the region’s central engine for meth production — according to briefing documents. In Thailand, the primary transit country for these chemicals into Myanmar, counternarcotics agencies say the challenge is overwhelming.
The operation at the border, carried out in October 2024, was one of a dozen major chemical seizures in the past year. It is part of a new effort targeting precursor ingredients — one that was borne out of desperation, said Worranan Srilum, a police major in the Thai Justice Ministry’s Department of Special Investigation.
Among the 800 tons of chemicals captured in that seizure: toluene, which helps purify meth crystals; acetone, a solvent used in cleaning and preparation; and sodium hydroxide, essential for chemical reactions in the synthesis of meth.
Proving these compounds were being moved for drug production, however, has been tricky, Worranan said. A year into the investigation, charges have not yet been brought.
“We are having to play a new role,” Worranan said, “because there is a new problem.”
‘Mafia town’
A record 236 tons of meth was seized in Southeast and East Asia last year — up 24 percent from the year before, the UNODC reported. The “predominant” source, the U.N. says, is Myanmar’s eastern Shan state, a forbidding tract of mountainous jungle that borders China. It is ruled by a patchwork of ethnic rebels, the most powerful of them the United Wa State Army (UWSA), a reclusive group designated by the U.S. as a narcotics trafficker and regarded by Washington think tanks and researchers as a proxy of China.
Many commanders at the UWSA, which has its roots in the Communist Party of Burma, speak Chinese and possess both Myanmar and Chinese citizenship, according to State Department and U.S. Treasury reports. China denies that it arms the UWSA. But at a 2019 UWSA military parade showcasing Chinese equipment, senior Chinese officials — including China’s envoy for Southeast Asia — sat alongside the leader of the rebel group, Bao Youxiang, also known as Pao Yu Hsiang, who had already been indicted by the U.S. on heroin and methamphetamine trafficking charges.
At least eight of the militia’s commanders are wanted by the U.S. for drug crimes, although the UWSA officially denies involvement in narcotics.
Patrick Winn, a journalist who has spent years talking to individuals close to the group, including former troops and advisers, said the UWSA first entered the drug trade by providing land, security and logistical support to Chinese drug syndicates migrating from the mainland to evade the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Underpinning this arrangement was an “iron rule” that the finished drugs don’t flow back into China, Winn said. “That’s why we see it going outwards.”
A spokesperson for the UWSA, Nyi Rang, declined to answer inquiries on narcotics or the group’s ties to China.
In 2021, Myanmar’s military ousted a democratically elected government, plunging the country into civil war. Counternarcotics efforts diminished as the formal economy collapsed. For the UWSA and its Chinese partners, this was the start of a golden age.
In parts of the Asia-Pacific region, the retail price of crystal meth, or “ice,” has halved since 2021 even as purity has remained stable — a sign of a supply glut, according to the UNODC.
Meth use in Australia, which jumped 21 percent between 2023 and 2024, now verges on an epidemic, according to wastewater surveys. Australian police estimated in 2022 that about 70 percent of “ice” in the country originates in Shan state.
In South Korea, the Health Ministry estimated in 2024 that the total number of illicit drug users had risen by more than 60 percent in five years, to over 400,000. Traces of meth were detected at dozens of sewage plants across the country, suggesting widespread use.
Nowhere, however, have the effects of Shan state’s production boom been more harrowing than in Myanmar itself. Living amid conflict and spiraling unemployment, the country’s youths have become prime testing ground for new drug concoctions, from stronger meth pills to poly-drug cocktails known as “happy water,” according to civil society organizations.
Ground zero is Tachileik, a township of about 200,000 people and the gateway to Shan state.
Just across the border from the nondescript Thai outpost of Mae Sai, units of armed men can be seen patrolling casinos and karaoke bars in Tachileik, where, according to locals, drugs are sold openly. It’s routine to find the dead bodies of overdose victims tossed outside drug dens, residents say. Passing by a graveyard in Tachileik that has become a campsite for addicts, Post reporters saw teenagers staggering around in a zombielike state.
Pon Li, a human rights activist from Tachileik now living in Thailand, said her hometown has become a “mafia town.” The UWSA owns and controls the real estate but it’s Chinese business delegations that bring the money, materials and expertise, she said.
“Every local knows this,” Pon Li added. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
In plain sight
In July 2020, a Lao customs agent flagged an unusual shipment to the UNODC’s regional office in Bangkok. Seventy-two tons of propionyl chloride — a precursor ingredient for synthetic drugs, including meth — was headed from western Laos to Myanmar’s Shan state.
The chemical had been manufactured by Goldlink Industries Co., a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned enterprise, then transported through Thailand, according to customs documents. When the shipment was stopped in Laos, a broker representing Xinye Import and Export Development Corp. in Shan state sent a letter asking for its release.
“Our company wants to use this chemical propionyl chloride to be used as raw material for fertilizer production and mineral separation, therefore please your support,” the letter said. On the advice of the UNODC, Lao authorities blocked it. Neither Goldlink nor Xinye responded to requests for comment.
The interdiction was a “rare and important success,” said Jeremy Douglas, who served until last year as the UNODC head in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.
But it was also chilling confirmation of what UNODC investigators had begun to suspect at the time, he said: Lurking under legal trade flows, there were sophisticated operations to move large amounts of meth precursors from China into Shan state. “Given the volume of trafficking out of Shan, it was clear many, many other shipments have gone through,” Douglas said.
In 2023, U.N. investigators in Asia identified another Chinese company, called Wingroup Pharmaceutical, that was advertising chemicals alongside tutorials showing how those chemicals could be synthesized into drug precursors, according to documents disseminated to law enforcement in Southeast Asia and reviewed by The Post.
Located in Wuhan, Wingroup was verified on the Chinese marketplace Alibaba, where it offered clients the add-on service of mislabeling chemicals in bottles of hand soap and beeswax canisters, according to screenshots of company posts that have since been removed. Wingroup listed cryptocurrencies like bitcoin as its preferred payment method and publicized instructions on how to exchange gift cards into crypto.
Messages to numbers and emails associated with the company were not answered. Alibaba said Wingroup is no longer a verified seller on its platform, adding that it has a “zero-tolerance policy regarding listings that could be used for illegal activities.”
U.N. investigators said Wingroup has sold fentanyl precursors directly to buyers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. In February, a U.S. court found two Chinese nationals, one of whom operated as a sales manager for Wingroup, guilty of conspiracy to import “ton quantities” of fentanyl and meth precursors from Wuhan into the U.S. Despite these actions, however, the company has remained operational and shows “red flags” in its extensive business dealings in Southeast Asia, according to U.S. law enforcement officials.
TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco, last year identified more than 120 similar Chinese chemical companies that it determined were precursor suppliers, nearly all of which accepted payment in cryptocurrency. It found that deposits into crypto wallets linked to these firms increased more than 600 percent from 2022 to 2023, then doubled in the first four months of 2024 compared with the same period the previous year. In 2023, the wallets collectively received over $26 million.
TRM also found that nearly two-thirds of vendors selling fentanyl precursors also advertised precursors for other drugs: Ecstasy for Western Europe. Mephedrone for Russia. Meth for Asia. The networks at the heart of the fentanyl trade were the “backbone” for virtually every other synthetic drug in the world, TRM said in a report.
“It became clear to us that this goes beyond fentanyl and beyond the U.S.,” said Alois Afilipoaie, a senior threat analyst at TRM. “China is the epicenter of the entire global crisis of illicit drugs.”
New concoctions
The sickly, sweet smell of vanilla wafted from the first floor of the Office of the Narcotics Control Board (ONCB) in downtown Bangkok. Under fluorescent lights, mask-wearing workers slashed open seized packets of flavored meth tablets branded with the number “999” — a trademark of labs in Shan state, according to the DEA.
There were about 10 million tablets delivered that morning from a raid in northern Thailand. This would have been a record haul five years ago. But now it was routine, according to Tassawan Korsetthaphong, the scientist overseeing the counting. Police stations across the country enter a queue to submit their bounties to the ONCB’s analysis division for testing, and as of September, she said, the queue was filled till the end of the year.
This mountain of work, however, isn’t what keeps her up at night.
In the early 2010s, when chemicals like ephedrine and pseudoephedrine began being diverted from cold medication to meth, Thailand banned them from being sold to the public. For a while, illicit trade of these chemicals surged, prompting seizures. But in recent years, there have been barely any interdictions of these chemicals even as the amount of meth from the region has soared.
The reason, Tassawan said, is that there are dozens of ways to engineer ephedrine and pseudoephedrine from noncontrolled substances. This, she said, is the agency’s most pressing issue.
Last year, a U.S. federal grand jury indicted four leaders of a Wuhan-based company — Hubei Aoks Bio-Tech Co. Ltd. — on charges of selling fentanyl precursors, after which they were arrested by Chinese authorities, according to the U.S. Justice Department. As recently as October, however, Hubei Aoks still had public pages on export business platforms listing Thailand as one of its main markets, and law enforcement officials in Thailand said they suspected that spin-offs of the company were still actively doing business in Southeast Asia.
Messages to numbers and emails associated with Hubei Aoks were not answered.
Shipments tracked by U.S. law enforcement show record volumes of chemicals such as sodium cyanide and benzyl chloride entering Thailand with no corresponding justification in the legal economy, U.S. officials said. The DEA now wants to focus new support for Thailand’s counternarcotics efforts on interdicting precursor ingredients, not finished drugs, officials said.
But the ONCB’s mandate does not include oversight of noncontrolled substances.
Prin Mekanandha, director of the agency’s Narcotics Law Enforcement Bureau, gave the final sign-off for the operation to raid the warehouse at the Myanmar border, where ONCB personnel found more than 4,000 plastic tanks filled with precursor chemicals. Following the seizure, however, the case was handed to the Justice Ministry’s Department of Special Investigation, which has more sweeping powers than the ONCB to investigate.
In truth, Prin said, he was relieved.
It’s extremely difficult to prove these chemicals were being transported to Myanmar for drug production. If companies in Myanmar say they needed these materials for legitimate reasons, Thailand has few options to push back, Prin said.
Was it possible to ask Chinese authorities to assist?
The working relationship with Chinese authorities is robust, he began. The question, however, of whether Thailand could call on China to do more to regulate chemical exports was “difficult” to answer, Prin said. Thailand is a small country, “not like the U.S.,” and small countries, he said, don’t make demands of superpowers.
Limited restraints
Two years ago, in response to pressure from the U.N. and the International Narcotics Control Board, China tightened controls over drug precursors being transported from the southwest province of Yunnan — the Chinese province that borders Myanmar and Laos — to Shan state. As exports across this land boundary slowed, however, new routes through transit countries including Thailand and Laos expanded, U.N. investigators say.
During a closed-door discussion on chemical precursors in Shanghai last year, Ohn Khaing, a deputy police colonel in the Myanmar junta, explained the shifting routes to Chinese authorities in a presentation on chemical interdictions.
“The smuggling of precursors from the border areas to produce synthetic drugs has significantly increased,” the official said in documents reviewed by The Post. Photos showed seized barrels and sacks of precursor compounds in Myanmar stamped “Made in China.” They included:
7.5 tons of tartaric acid in September 2023.
2.75 tons of sodium acetate in November 2023.
14.9 tons of sodium cyanide in July 2024.
China’s Ministry of Public Security acknowledged in a report last year that “as chemical smuggling routes continued to diversify and methods evolved, chemical control faced greater challenges.” Professors at the police college in Yunnan have also warned that “the smuggling of non-listed precursor chemicals has become a serious security risk” that could “negatively impact” China’s image.
Still, according to analysts and law enforcement, the Chinese government’s regulation of precursors remains limited.
The trade in precursor ingredients occurs openly on Chinese marketplaces, researchers say, and restricting such activity relies almost entirely on the CCP, said Coyne, the former Australian police official. “Could the CCP, if it wanted, go after these chemical plants? Could it enforce compliance? Absolutely,” he said.
The U.N., Interpol and other agencies ask governments to use the global Pre-Export Notification system to seek more details from recipient countries on how potential drug precursors will be used. But China has “low use levels” relative to the scale of its chemical industry and the frequency with which its chemicals are diverted to drugs, according to briefing documents disseminated to law enforcement agencies across Southeast Asia and reviewed by The Post.
Although Chinese authorities say they are building a system to track noncontrolled chemicals, little has been shared on this system, the documents said.
In a recent report to Congress, the U.S. State Department said that even when Chinese authorities appear to take action against companies that have been indicted or sanctioned by the U.S., such as by rescinding licenses, illicit operations are often quickly funneled to other firms. As of September, “there have been no arrests or prosecutions on narcotics-related charges in China for those involved in globally trafficking precursors,” the report said.
Trump effect
During the Biden administration, China increased counternarcotics work with the U.S., including expanding its list of drug precursors subject to heightened monitoring. Much of this cooperation, however, has dried up under Trump, analysts and former U.S. officials say.
Trump’s trade disputes with China have derailed bilateral cooperation on drug flows, they say. His administration has also dismantled programs at the State Department and Justice Department that had been facilitating intelligence sharing, training, and collaboration with police and courts in other countries on narcotics, making it more difficult to bring cases against Chinese precursor suppliers, former officials said.
“In the Biden administration, there was an acknowledgment that if you wanted to eliminate the cartels, you had to think globally about the entire precursor supply chain,” said Samantha Sultoon, a former director for sanctions at the National Security Council now serving as a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank. “That strategy … doesn’t seem to be in play anymore.”
A Justice Department spokesperson, Natalie Baldassarre, denied that any programs targeting the flow of precursors had been cut. A State Department spokesperson said the Trump administration had eliminated programs and partnerships “with duplicative efforts” but that it continues to use “all necessary tools to deter and dismantle the flow of fentanyl.”
White House spokesperson Kush Desai said years of Washington’s “status quo policymaking” had failed to stem the drug crisis. “The administration is aggressively rectifying this failure, and will soon be setting up working groups with Chinese officials to cooperate on the fentanyl issue with objective measures to save even more American lives,” Desai said.
Drug traffickers, meanwhile, are expanding their reach. Latin American cartels are already encroaching into the edges of the Asia-Pacific region, showing signs of “trade and crossover” with drug syndicates here, said David Caunter, director of organized and emerging crime at Interpol.
In the Shan Hills, capable partners lie in wait.
Between the 1970s and the 1990s, Shan state was a major producer of heroin that made its way to the U.S. The UWSA and its partners shifted over the past decade from farming poppy plants to making meth.
But it would be easy for them to evolve again and start producing synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which is becoming profitable worldwide, said Andrew Sorrells, a former DEA special agent deployed to Bangkok. The Shan state drugmakers are already working with the Chinese suppliers producing the right ingredients.
“It’s the logical next step,” Sorrells said. “At some point, they’ll switch.”
Wilawan Watcharasakwej in Bangkok; Lyric Li in Seoul; a Shan reporter in Chiang Mai, Thailand; and Pei-Lin Wu in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, contributed to this report. Graphics by Álvaro Valiño. Editing by Anna Fifield, Natalia Jiménez, Luis Velarde and Adrián Blanco Ramos. Copy editing by Vanessa Larson.