China Confronts Afghan Drugs: Law Enforcement Views of “The Golden Crescent”

This study employs underexploited Chinese-language law enforcement publications to analyze China’s concerns over the rapid expansion of illegal drug smuggling from the “Golden Crescent” region (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran) into western China since about 2005. These law enforcement publications present an unusually frank and detailed picture of China’s growing anxieties about drug-trafficking into its heavily Muslim Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. These writings provide detailed discussion of the evolving air, highway, and rail transport routes employed by traffickers to move drugs across Central Asia’s rugged borderlands with China. Chinese police concede that the increasing sophistication of these international traffickers and failures in their own counternarcotics intelligence work are creating new challenges to their efforts to stanch these flows. Law enforcement specialists also see Golden Crescent drugs as a major threat to society and a key financial support to terrorism, ethnic separatism and extremism.