WASHINGTON — In 2022, synthetic opioids killed more than 75,000 Americans. But according to the authors of China’s Total War Strategy: Next-Generation Weapons of Mass Destruction, these fentanyl deaths were not simply the result of regulatory failures or a national addiction crisis. They were casualties in a covert biochemical war — one that Western governments remain unwilling to confront. This war, the authors argue, is not waged by rogue actors, but directed by the strategic command of the Chinese Communist Party, wielding an arsenal that includes fentanyl, cognitive warfare, genetically engineered viruses — including the bat coronavirus they say leaked accidentally from Wuhan and was later weaponized through statecraft — and a global criminal underworld mobilized as an instrument of policy.

“This is strategic activity that is driven by hostile state intent,” the authors write, referring to opioid trafficking networks that fuse China’s state-backed chemical supply chains with the industrial-scale production infrastructure of Mexican cartels.

They describe the fentanyl epidemic as “biochemical warfare against a highly clustered group of Western countries” — with the Five Eyes nations as primary targets — and argue that synthetic narcotics can no longer be viewed solely through the lens of organized crime. Instead, they should be understood as instruments in a state-enabled campaign of mass disruption orchestrated by Beijing.

Within the book’s evidentiary framework, China’s alleged fentanyl campaign — paired with the global consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic — emerges as the most consequential demonstration to date of what the authors describe as Beijing’s increasingly effective total war doctrine.

The thesis is unflinchingly dark, confrontational — and, to many readers, will seem conspiratorial. Yet the authors, a team of American national security and military intelligence veterans, construct their case with layers of evidence and the methods of intelligence tradecraft. They connect the Chinese Party-state’s export of fentanyl precursor chemicals and chemical engineering expertise to Mexican cartels, its cognitive warfare operations on Western social media platforms, and its role in the COVID-19 pandemic — forging these seemingly disparate elements into a predictive model of how the Chinese Communist Party is reengineering modern warfare.

This doctrine of clandestine total war, rooted in Chinese military texts, assumes that Beijing — which has signaled intentions to invade Taiwan as early as 2027 — cannot prevail in a conventional conflict against a coalition that may include the United States, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Instead, the strategy prioritizes asymmetric, non-kinetic warfare designed to degrade an adversary’s societal resilience, probe its critical systems, and map its crisis response — all before open conflict begins.

Cognitive War and Elite Capture

The unfolding shadow war — and the development of next-generation clandestine weapons — is, the authors argue, being waged behind the smokescreen of foreign interference and influence operations. Total War Strategy outlines a multi-track offensive: some elements are deniable yet increasingly brazen and visible, while others remain deeply concealed and poorly understood.

The visible front includes familiar forms of state aggression — industrial espionage, economic coercion, transnational repression, intellectual property theft, election interference, and the covert financing of protest movements. The second, more insidious track, is cognitive warfare: the manipulation of information systems, digital platforms, and social media networks to fracture democratic cohesion and weaken public trust from within. China’s influence operations, according to the authors, serve not merely to shape narratives but to provide cover for far more dangerous strategic objectives.

They cite a pattern of “targeted influence campaigns to undermine, corrupt, persuade and destabilize regimes such as Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Panama, some European Union states and many Sub-Saharan African nations.” These efforts are complemented by sustained economic coercion, intimidation of diaspora communities, trafficking in weapons and narcotics, and the exploitation of academic and technological partnerships — all deployed as tools of indirect warfare.

“Such non-lethal efforts in unsuspecting societies and regimes often succeed,” the authors write, “because feckless leaders are too naive to grasp the insidious assassin’s mace approach.”

In this argument, fentanyl is a primary weapon — and states like Canada remain in denial about their institutional role in enabling the shift of Chinese production and trafficking routes.

Seen through the lens of North America’s fentanyl crisis — in which hundreds of thousands have died while policymakers continue to treat the emergency as a public health or law enforcement issue — the authors argue the Chinese Communist Party is already attacking Western defenses via transnational crime proxies.

“These hostile state extensions are engaged in biochemical warfare against a tightly clustered group of Western countries,” they write. “The effects have been devastating but are fragile and reversible once the massive information asymmetries regarding network structure are rebalanced. The successful collapse of these syndicates in the Five Eyes nations will reduce the likelihood of spread to other countries. The inverse is also true.”

The fentanyl trade, they argue, defies the logic of conventional criminal markets. Unlike heroin or cocaine, synthetic opioids annihilate their own user base. “Fentanyl-laced heroin does not generate a stable population of consumers,” they note, “given the high fatality rates of users.” In a rational market, a drug enterprise seeks to cultivate long-term demand. Fentanyl destroys it. And yet, production and distribution continue to scale exponentially.

Unlike traditional cartels, which can be disrupted through leadership arrests or financial seizures, a state-backed trafficking network is more resilient, adaptive, and strategically dangerous. The CCP’s role — supplying precursor chemicals, trafficking infrastructure, and, in some cases, managerial oversight — elevates the threat from criminal to geopolitical.

That threat, they note, is not evenly distributed. The most devastating effects of synthetic narcotics are concentrated in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Europe, despite its liberalized approach to drug markets, has seen no comparable surge in fentanyl fatalities — yet.

COVID-19: Accident Evolves into ‘Field Test’

The authors’ thesis is stark: China’s covert bioweapons program did not merely survive the COVID-19 pandemic — it accelerated, diversified, and deepened in its aftermath.

While much of the world remains fixated on the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the plausible origin point of the COVID-19 crisis, the authors caution that Wuhan was only one node in a vast and opaque network.

Drawing on open-source intelligence, forensic research, and a review of Chinese scientific literature, the authors contend that the Chinese Communist Party has dramatically expanded its clandestine biological weapons program across multiple pathogen types and geographic locations — including, notably, a military-linked facility in Islamabad, Pakistan. Their analysis synthesizes pre- and post-pandemic data, Chinese-language publications, patent filings, and sensitive research documents — some of which disappeared from public access shortly after surfacing.

To build their case, the authors first established a pre-COVID baseline of biological research activity in China, then overlaid post-pandemic developments. What emerges, they argue, is a sprawling, dual-use biological weapons network spanning labs in Wuhan, Harbin, and Beijing — embedded within China’s vast research infrastructure and operated under both civilian and military auspices. Their findings surpass what has been publicly disclosed by Western governments, though they align with intelligence assessments from the United Kingdom, Germany, the FBI, and now the CIA.

According to the authors, the original SARS-CoV-2 outbreak was the result of an accidental lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in late 2019. They tie the incident to a long-documented pattern of high-risk bat coronavirus gain-of-function experiments conducted at the institute — many of which, they argue, fall within the broader scope of the People’s Liberation Army’s biological warfare program. That program, they assert, enjoys top-level political and military protection from Major General Chen Wei — a senior figure in the CCP’s elite scientific apparatus — whose subordinates have collaborated freely with researchers in Canada and the United States under the guise of pandemic preparedness.

This claim aligns with intelligence findings from CSIS, Canada’s national security agency, and several of its Five Eyes counterparts. But the authors go further: they assert that rather than responding transparently to the accidental lab leak in Wuhan, the Chinese regime quickly adapted — transforming a domestic crisis into a global strategic opportunity.

According to their analysis, CCP-linked intelligence services closely monitored how other nations — including the United States and its allies — responded to the pandemic across public health, economic, and defense sectors. This real-time surveillance, the authors suggest, turned COVID-19 into a de facto field test: a live demonstration of how resilient the West would be in the face of sudden, high-impact biological disruption — and how such disruption could be exploited.

Crucially, they stress that China’s bioweapons research is not limited to coronaviruses. On the far more dangerous end of the threat spectrum, they say, the CCP is pursuing weaponization of high-fatality pathogens such as Nipah virus and African swine fever. Even within the SARS-CoV-2 family, the work continues. One January 2024 study, cited by the authors, describes a new synthetic variant engineered at the Beijing University of Chemical Technology — work they suggest poses even greater risks than the original pandemic strain.

Perhaps most alarming is the convergence they document between genetic engineering and delivery technologies. The CCP, the authors assert, is pairing its pathogen research with advanced nanotechnology platforms — opening the door to next-generation weapons that are more targeted, more concealable, and far more difficult to defend against. Supporting evidence includes experimental data and patent filings that demonstrate efforts to bind engineered viruses with nanoparticles designed for precise delivery.

Even if only portions of the authors’ findings and predictions prove accurate, the book’s well-supported claims suggest that governments — from Washington to Taipei, Berlin, Ottawa, and Canberra — should be urgently educating their populations about the realities of hybrid warfare campaigns waged by Beijing and other hostile states. At a minimum, they should be intensifying preparations for the plausible — if nightmarish — scenarios that Total War Strategy outlines.

With millions already dead since 2020 from the bat coronavirus pandemic and the fentanyl epidemic — both of which, even the most cautious experts acknowledge, trace back to Chinese sources, whether intentionally produced or not — anything less than a serious, studied response to the theory and evidence presented in Total War Strategy would constitute a dangerous dereliction of duty.

Authors Dr. Ryan Clarke, LJ Eads, Dr. Robert McCreight, and Dr. Xiaoxu Lin are national security experts with diverse government and professional backgrounds, and co-founders of the CCP BioThreats Initiative.