On the surface, the coronavirus and fentanyl occupy different material domains: One is a rare bat virus, the other is a common synthetic opioid. But these twin epidemics represent a larger phenomenon of Sino-American complicity. Since China’s economic liberalization and admission to the global trade system, US companies have benefited from the cheap labor supply in cities like Wuhan; in exchange, the Chinese Communist Party has become a world economic power.

Now, we are experiencing the dark side of this pact. The globalized market can deliver an astonishing array of cheap products to American households; but it can also deliver industrial quantities of fentanyl and make us vulnerable to a disease like COVID-19.

The result is breathtaking: By year’s end, a single city in central China, which most Americans had never heard of, will have produced a virus and a chemical that could kill more than 1 million people across the globe.

And in both cases, the Beijing ­regime’s negligence, if not intentional malice, are contributing factors.

The Wuhan Virus isn't the Only Pandemic to Come from China

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