US accuses dozens of Western countries of helping China

The White House accused more than 40 countries, including Canada, Mexico and Japan, of helping China evade US tariffs through transshipment, the Financial Times reported.

The accusation was made in a White House report titled “The Great Transshipment Scam” issued by Peter Navarro’s office. The report said the nations and the EU were enabling tariff evasion for $60bn in trade and cited other US government and private-sector estimates ranging from $40bn to $303bn.

Navarro, head of the White House office of trade and manufacturing policy, said China had used “extremely sophisticated” methods to engage in transshipment since Donald Trump first imposed tariffs on China in 2018. “For years, the great transshipment scam has let communist China launder its exports to more than 40 countries, rob our Treasury of tens of billions of dollars and steal the pay cheques of American workers,” Navarro said.

Navarro said Trump signed a new executive order last month increasing Customs and Border Protection’s enforcement powers against transshipment. He said the agency was being equipped with an AI-powered system called “Detective Border” and told Bloomberg TV it was achieving “over 95% hit rates in terms of accuracy” in identifying transshippers.

US trade representative Jamieson Greer said the benefits of Trump’s trade deals should go to the countries that agreed to them. “Transshipment is a form of freeriding off President Trump’s deals and is perpetuated by bad-faith exporters who are often the very reason we have tariffs in the first place,” Greer said, while the trade agency continued work on rules of origin to determine where products are made.

The report came six weeks before President Xi Jinping was expected to make a reciprocal visit to Washington after welcoming Trump in Beijing in May. The FT said trade tensions remained high despite a one-year truce reached by Trump and Xi in Busan, South Korea, last October.