Federal prosecutors in Mississippi charged [Chinese national] Yan, 41, in September with leading an empire built on the manufacture and sale of drugs related to fentanyl, one of the world's deadliest and most profitable narcotics. So strong that it's been studied as a chemical weapon, the drug has saturated American streets with breathtaking speed: It kills more people than any other opioid, including prescription pills and heroin, because it's so easy to overdose. Authorities say they have linked Yan and his 9W Technology Co. to more than 100 distributors across the U.S. and at least 20 other countries. Investigators expect scores of arrests as they dismantle his alleged network.

A new report out from Bloomberg (first spotted on Axios Vitals ) signals that China has more ways to defeat us than merely through its military buildup :

A month after the indictment, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein held a Washington news conference to shine a spotlight on Yan and another man, Zhang Jian, 39, who's accused of a similar scheme. Their indictments, Rosenstein told reporters, marked "a major milestone in our battle to stop deadly fentanyl from reaching the United States." Yan is the first Chinese national the U.S. has ever added to its "consolidated priority organization target" list of individuals thought to command the world's most prolific drug-trafficking and money-laundering networks. Investigators say his strategy was to offer fentanyl-like compounds called analogues – which differ slightly on a molecular level but produce similar effects – in order to exploit discrepancies between the laws in the U.S. and China.

So, along with Mexico, we now have the lovely spectacle of two of our top trading partners trying to kill us.

But is it really China, or just some miscreant inside China? Bloomberg makes the case that it's China. The problem is its policy: China says the drug lord never broke any of its laws, and the Chinese sure as heck weren't going to extradite him. As Sam Baker at Axios Vitals notes in his short commentary, citing the takeaway from an expert:

"The two countries play by different rules," Markos Kounalakis, a visiting fellow at Stanford University, told Bloomberg. "What's bad for America is not necessarily bad for China."

What does this mean? It actually leaps out, because history is always instructive in the matter of China. Bloomberg notes:

China has a fraught history with opium, dating to when foreign traders imported it in the mid-1800s. Widespread addiction followed, and attempts to stamp out the trade triggered two futile wars against the British.

The British didn't exactly have an honorable history with China back in the19th century. First they got the Chinese addicted to opium, complete with opium dens, and then, when China's leaders tried to stop it, they fought two wars against them, defeating them handily so they could continue to distribute their opium to the public. Ugly stuff.

China has never gotten over that experience, which, fairly considered, was bad, and has nursed grievances about Western imperialism ever since. But the Chinese also took in the lessons. Drugs can debilitate a population and make it easy to defeat, because that's what happened to China. The ugly final result was Mao's communist takeover and the communist horrors that followed, carrying on since.

Now they're flooding our country with illegal addictive drugs, well worse than opiates, or their recent derivative, heroin, moving on to fentanyl.

We know that the Chinese study history. We know they look to the long term. We know they are using the South China Sea as their launch pad toward global power, following the example of America, which used the Caribbean Sea (and the Panama Canal) as its launching pad to global power – which ended up at the same South China Sea.

Now we can see the outlines of another opium war, this one being foisted back at us, not Britain, and with China using the legal technicalities of our left-wing lawyers as weapons against us to justify flooding our country with opiates.

It's a call for President Trump, Jeff Sessions, Rod Rosenstein and anyone else watching this to be as hard-ass and unyielding as possible with the Chicoms as they push against us with poison. They're trying to kill us.