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Just before dawn on Dec. 29, 2013, the southern Chinese fishing village of Boshe awoke to a scene reminiscent of a Hollywood action flick: Over 3,000 police officers, backed by helicopters and speedboats, burst into traditional stone houses in search of illegal drugs. With cameramen in tow, the police destroyed 77 methamphetamine labs, seized three tons of crystal meth and more than 100 tons of meth ingredients. Among the 182 people arrested were a former local Communist Party chief and 13 other officials.

Police officials later admitted that Lufeng county, where Boshe is, had been producing one-third of China’s crystal meth for years. Around 20 percent of the 1,700 households were involved in the local drug trade. Elderly women were paid to cut up ephedrae plants, a staple of traditional Chinese medicine that is also a precursor for meth. Children spent their school vacations unwrapping cold medicine capsules also used to concoct the drug.



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Let that sink in for a second. How was it possible that a tiny rural county inside the world’s largest police state could transform into a lucrative drug cartel and operate for so long unhindered?

I was in Beijing when the story broke, days after the raid, wondering exactly that.



Curiosity piqued, I started poking around the web, which led me down a rabbit hole of shady Chinese chemical factories openly hawking mind-bending substances to snort, smoke or swallow that have been blamed for hundreds of deaths worldwide. Some have turned users (Floridians, mostly) into deranged pseudo-zombies with a penchant for violent, nude rampages.

I was surprised that the long tail of China’s e-commerce boom stretched into designer drugs. But it was the brazenness of the entire industry that awed me. In the United States, the public was dismayed to learn of the Silk Road, that erstwhile online drug bazaar which operated in the hidden passages of the Internet sometimes referred to as the dark web, where narcotics could be bought anonymously.

But these Chinese companies were not even trying to hide: They listed their phone numbers and addresses. Their English-language websites featured stock photos of sports cars and cheerful scientists in white lab coats.

Looking for flakka, the banned stimulant, nicknamed “$5 insanity” and notorious for triggering the violent, naked sprees? Type the chemical name into Google and voilà: Hundreds of Chinese companies are just a click away, eager to send a shipment abroad, as if it were a pair of shoes.

A saleswoman who picked up the phone at Hebei Ruishun Trade and Industry Co., which produces flakka for export, typified the cavalier attitudes the companies hold about peddling deadly synthetic drugs. “Look, my job is to sell it,” she said. “That’s all.”

I visited China Enriching Chemistry, the Shanghai company founded by a chemist named Zhang Lei. In late 2013, Mr. Zhang was arrested by Chinese police after years of selling lab-produced synthetics around the world through his massive e-commerce operation. His trick was to tweak the chemical recipe of the drug to skirt existing drug laws.

But this was more than a story of a science nerd gone bad. Mr. Zhang was able to build a global drug empire in plain sight of Chinese authorities. And even after he was arrested, the company continued taking orders.



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So I flew down to Shanghai, hopped in a cab and emerged outside a large corporate office park not far from the international airport. This was no seedy urban alley populated by dangerous looking people. It was lunchtime, and the compound was full of office workers — corporate ID cards hanging from lanyards around their necks — heading out for a bite to eat. In the office building’s lobby, China Enriching Chemical was listed in the directory. The company logo appeared in a sixth floor entryway, beyond which were a number of cubicles staffed by young people. In a large corner office sat Mr. Zhang’s mother, Wang Guoying, a part owner in the company who last year was sanctioned along with her son by the United States Treasury Department, which stated that she had received “hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments for illicit synthetic substances.”

Ms. Wang was less than happy to look up and find a foreign reporter in her midst.

“If I wanted to sell drugs I couldn’t possibly sell it on a website,” she said. “I don’t know how to use the Internet.” Mr. Zhang was similarly above reproach and unfairly targeted. “Ever since he was little he was always in the top three of his class. My son has been the best of the best since he was young, and now it’s come to this.”



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But he handed out business cards linked to his English-language website full of illegal drugs, I responded, which only made her angrier. “I feel you’re cooking up the news,” she said. “We had no problems with the company, and now we have a ton.”

Then she invited me to lunch. It was an awkward meal of steamed fish and vegetables during which she tried to engender sympathy while criticizing the United States government for being “anti-China.” Still, I left pleasantly surprised that I had gained access to such a big player in this ongoing drama of drugs and geopolitics.

What were China’s police authorities doing about all of this? I wanted to know that too, but getting any of them to talk was virtually impossible. Despite repeated faxes to the Ministry of Public Security (the only means of communication), all I heard was radio silence. This is, as any reporter in China will tell you, completely normal. Everything is on a need-to-know basis, and reporters never need to know.

But in my investigation, I discovered that foreign police forces are also routinely shut out. Law enforcement officials from several countries described their interactions with Chinese counterparts as maddeningly frustrating and sometimes outright insulting. Despite sharing with Chinese authorities their investigative methods, technology and extensive intelligence on drug traffickers, they often receive little in return but pressure to remain silent about China’s intransigence.

“The Chinese hide behind their bureaucracy,” said a Western law enforcement official, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “All they want to do is save face.”

Of course, the Chinese police tell a very different story when they do speak. Last year, Liu Yuejin, China’s then-chief of the Ministry of Public Security’s narcotics control bureau, attended a United Nations news conference in Beijing on antidrug cooperation. Seated at a dais, Mr. Liu championed China’s “determination and confidence” to cooperate with foreign law enforcement, citing China’s lead role in capturing a Burmese drug lord in Laos who was executed in China. “The success of this case shows justice has defeated evil, he said. “Righteousness was spread.”

But asked about China’s huge domestic meth cartel known as Lufeng county, Mr. Liu sought to cast the blame abroad. “As we all know, most drugs consumed in China are mostly smuggled in from outside,” he said, despite the ministry having admitted that the county produced a third of China’s meth. “Foreign groups provide techniques and funding, local criminals provide space and workers.”

Mr. Liu credited the “sudden and fatal sweep” of Lufeng in 2013 as proof the crisis was basically over. “We believe after a while, this issue will be fundamentally solved,” he said. (Fast forward to February 2015, when another police raid on Lufeng labs seized yet another 2.4 tons of meth.)

Though Mr. Liu described China as a “responsible nation,” its commitment to stamping out its huge (and hugely lucrative) illicit drug export industry appears to take a back seat to domestic political issues, as illustrated by another incident that occurred in Lufeng county, just 30 miles from Boshe, in the village of Wukan. In December 2011, residents of Wukan took to the streets in protest over the rampant theft of farmland by corrupt local officials, who secretly sold off hundreds of acres to developers. After a protest leader died in police custody, the protesters chased away their government leaders and set up roadblocks.

Here’s the rub: Thousands of police officers raced past the years-long meth-production binge of Boshe to quell a political protest in Wukan, which ended a few days later. The geographical proximity of these two villages — and the authorities’ vastly different responses to their transgressions — seems to me a sobering reminder of China’s true priorities, and how far those really are from the rest of the world’s.