Vance Meets Chinese Deputy Leader Ahead of Inauguration

U.S. Vice President-elect JD Vance attends the Vice Presidential Dinner at the National Gallery of Art in Washington on Jan. 18, 2025. Eric Thayer/Getty Images

Vice President-elect JD Vance met with China’s deputy leader Han Zheng on Sunday morning, the Trump–Vance transition team said.

Han, the vice chairman of the Chinese regime and member of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), will attend President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday.

Last month, Trump invited Chinese leader Xi Jinping to attend his inauguration, and the Chinese leader opted to send his deputy instead.

The Trump–Vance transition team said in a statement that Vance had welcomed Han to the United States and to the inauguration.

The pair discussed “a range of topics including fentanyl, balancing trade, and regional stability,” the statement said, without providing details.

Beijing did not issue a statement.

China’s unfair trade practices and the flow of illicitly manufactured fentanyl or fentanyl analogs from China to the United States are two of the most contentious issues between the two countries.

The Biden administration had kept all tariffs that the previous Trump administration had imposed, and added more on China-made products including electric vehicles, semiconductors, and steel.

Trump has also vowed to continue tackling the problems, threatening to impose tariffs of more than 60 percent on Chinese goods, and an additional 10 percent if the Chinese regime doesn’t stop the outflows that create fentanyl.

Since 2013, the drugs have dramatically pushed up the rate of overdose deaths from synthetic opioids in the United States, from 1 death per 100,000 standard population in 2013 to 22.7 per 100,000 standard population in 2022, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, which is under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 2022 alone, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl killed 73,838 people in the United States, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. 

In previous years, fentanyl and precursors of the drug from China were predominantly shipped to the United States in small packages. In recent years, criminals have also begun to use the Pacific Islands as transit points.

According to a report published in April 2024 by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese regime owned stakes in some companies that were openly advertising the sale of illegal drugs to the Americas and subsidized the companies.

In December, the committee introduced three bills aimed at tackling the crisis.

China's Vice President Han Zheng attends a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Jan. 11, 2025. Florence Lo/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Vance and Han met after Trump said he had a “very good” phone call with Xi on Jan. 17, in which they discussed “balancing trade, fentanyl, TikTok, and many other subjects.”

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that he expected to “solve many problems” with Xi, and that they would “do everything possible to make the World more peaceful and safe.”

According to China’s state-controlled Xinhua news agency, Xi used the phone call to underline China and the United States’ “common interests” and “room for cooperation,” while asking Trump to “deal carefully” with Taiwan, a self-ruled island over which the CCP claims sovereignty.

Shen Ming-Shih, research fellow at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research and director of the institute’s division of national security research, told the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times that Xi was attempting to draw a red line, but it’s unlikely that either Washington or Beijing will compromise.

“Based on the Taiwan Relations Act, and America’s interests, the United States won’t change its policy on Taiwan. And if Beijing doesn’t cooperate on the issues of drugs, cognitive war, and trade, the United States will punish it,” he said.