Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
The US has accused more than 40 countries, including India, of being part of what it called a “shadow trans-shipment network” that helps China avoid high American tariffs. In a report titled ‘The Great Transshipment Scam’, top trade adviser Peter Navarro also said Washington would use artificial intelligence to detect such shipments and take action against them.
Navarro said the practice had become more common after 2018, when the Trump administration imposed Section 301 tariffs on China over what it described as unfair trade practices. The report estimated the annual value of illegally transshipped goods at between USD 40 billion and USD 303 billion, depending on the method and definition used.
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“For years, the great transshipment scam has let Communist China launder its exports through more than 40 countries,” Peter Navarro, Counsellor to the President for Trade and Manufacturing, told reporters. He said the countries in what he called China’s Shadow Transshipment Network included some of America’s biggest trading partners, from Mexico and Canada to the European Union, India, Japan and South Korea.
In the report, Navarro said, “China began using these third countries for minor processing, relabeling, repackaging, reinvoicing, or routing changes that created the appearance of a new national origin while leaving the underlying Chinese content largely intact.” He said that by routing goods around the tariffs, China and its state-supported manufacturers and trading firms could push goods into places with cheap labour, weak customs oversight, permissive free zones, or preferential US trade access.
The report said India’s Pune-Gujarat-Chennai production belt absorbs pumps and compressors, affecting industrial supply chains in Cincinnati, Dayton and Columbus. “A Chinese pump that leaves Pune as Indian is a pump not machined in Cincinnati, Dayton or Columbus,” Navarro said.
Navarro said the US would use an AI-enabled “Detective Border” to identify transshipped goods reaching American shores. The report said the system would support US Customs and Border Protection by combining shipment data, routing histories, product classifications, ownership relationships, production-capacity indicators, anomaly detection, computer vision and other analytical tools. “The objective is to improve CBP’s ability to distinguish legitimate nearshoring and foreign investment from illegal pass-through trade, identify high-risk shipments, and convert analytical findings into interdiction, duty collection, penalties, and exclusion,” the report said. In sum, the US report accused a broad group of countries, including India, of helping China reroute exports and said AI tools would be used to crack down on the practice.
With PTI Inputs
– Ends
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
