The White House accuses more than 40 countries of helping China to circumvent US tariffs
Department of Commerce: they cost the US between 19 and 26 billion a year in lost revenue.
The White House, one month on from President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington, accuses China of routing billions of dollars’ worth of goods through other countries to circumvent the tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump in 2018, costing the US between 19 and 26 billion a year in lost revenue.
In the 24-page report, entitled ‘The Great Transit Scam’ and featuring a photo of the Trojan horse, the US administration identifies over 40 countries – from Mexico to Israel, via Europe – as being involved in what it describes as a “global shadow transit network through which Chinese tariff evasion operates”.
The scheme in question involves routing goods through a third country in order to benefit from a lower tariff rate. Exporters are able to conceal a product’s origin by repackaging or relabelling it, and even by carrying out partial assembly in another country before shipping it to the US.
The report lists Canada, the EU, Japan and South Korea as countries at high risk of Chinese goods being diverted, whilst acknowledging that all of them – major US trading partners – engage in substantial legitimate trade.
The report cites various estimates of the scale of the phenomenon. For example, an analysis by the Department of Commerce estimated that around 67 billion worth of goods passed through Mexico, India and Vietnam from China last year, resulting in a loss of around 28 billion dollars in revenue.
