General

It's about international trade! The United States plans to propose a new bill to cancel tariff exemptions for Chinese e-commerce goods! A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the United States plans to propose a new bill aimed at abolishing the widely used tariff exemption for e-commerce sellers shipping goods from China to American shoppers.

It's about international trade! The United States plans to propose a new bill to cancel tariff exemptions for Chinese e-commerce goods! According to Reuters on Wednesday (June 14), this tariff exemption is known as the "minimum rule", according to which American individual consumers can waive tariffs by purchasing international trade imports worth $800 or less.

E-commerce platforms, such as Shein, an overseas version of Pinduoduo, founded in China and headquartered in Singapore, are the biggest beneficiaries of this exemption rule.

Once the aforementioned bill is passed, goods from China will no longer be exempt from relevant taxes.

A federal briefing in April stated that e-commerce sellers "use" minimum tariffs to evade tariffs and import so-called "illegal items" in international trade.

Bill Cassidy, the Republican senator who initiated the new law, explained that the bill would ban such goods from China immediately after its promulgation.

The other sponsors of the bill are Republican Senator JD Vance and Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin, and it is currently unclear how much support the proposal will receive. In 2022, a separate but similar bill proposed by Earl Blumenauer, the representative of the Democratic Party, failed to be passed in Congress.

According to the bill, countries outside of China and Russia can maintain exemptions by adopting a threshold of $800 for their own duty-free international trade imports. The bill will only allow private shippers such as FedEx, UPS, and DHL to transport minimum packages, excluding postal services.

After the end of the COVID-19, global consumption capacity and demand have weakened. Compared with the peak period, the overall e-commerce market has shrunk. The stock prices of Shopify, the independent station star service, Sea Ltd, the parent company of Shopee, the Southeast Asian e-commerce giant, and many consumer products/services companies declined significantly.

In fact, since 2019, trace transportation has attracted people's attention. At that time, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reported that it was difficult to capture unsafe international trade imports because of a large number of low value packages. According to US customs data, such shipments increased to $685.5 million in 2022, compared to $410.5 million in 2018. (Translated from: China Trade News)