Geopolitical imagination and the US war on drugs against China

ABSTRACT

The war on drugs has been an essential component of US territorial politics since the Second World War. This paper examines the US discursive war on drugs against China in the context of changing US–China relations. It focuses on two schemes. Scheme I is that in the 1950s state actors in the United States portrayed Communist China as a source country; and Scheme II is that the fentanyl-related opioid crisis exploding in 2017 in the United States was allegedly attributed to China. In linking illicit drugs and national security, this paper finds that the US war on drugs entails a blending of securitization and territorialization: illicit drugs as a security challenge and source countries as others. Through this blending, US policy-makers and media sources can weave together a discourse of an existential threat, making the war on drugs an imperative to defend US national security. This paper argues that the war on drugs is rendered discursive, allowing the United States to impose its view and place pressure on China for geopolitical interest. Geopolitical imagination epitomizes the operation of Great Power politics, or specifically, one geopolitical strategy through which the United States lays down and enforces the rules of the game for other countries.

KEYWORDS:

• war on drugs
• geopolitical imaginations
• international relations
• China
• territorial politics

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is grateful to the editor, John Agnew, as well as Alec Murphy and three anonymous referees whose comments made significant improvements to the arguments presented in this paper.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Xiaobo Su http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3697-9524

Notes

1 See https://www.congress.gov/.

2 Statement by the Hon. H. J. Anslinger, chief representative for the US delegation to the International Opium Conference at the United Nations, New York, 23 June 1952. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Library, Washington, DC.

3 Nixon White House background memo: ‘Alleged Involvement of the People’s Republic of China in Illicit Drug Traffic’, 15 February 1972, repr. in Congressional Record – House, 29 March 1972, 10881.

4 Within China, the Chinese state establishes a strict regulatory system to supervise the production and consumption of fentanyl-related pharmaceutical products. Fentanyl addiction is not yet widespread in China.

5 See http://www.baltimoresun.com/health/bs-hs-opioid-deaths-20180126-story.html/.

6 See http://abc27.com/2018/01/12/york-county-heroin-fentanyl-overdose-deaths-almost-double-in-2017/.

7 See https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-meeting-senior-military-leaders/.

Additional information

Funding

The author thanks the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation, University of Oregon, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 41829101] for their financial support.