Chinese goods, the US government says, are being shipped through third countries before arriving in America, allowing them to enter with paperwork that obscures their origin and sidestep levies imposed on Chinese exports. That routing method is called transshipment: a cargo stops in an intermediate country, acquires that country's trade documentation, and then moves onward as if it originated there. The White House says this practice accounts for $60 billion in trade, and it is calling the operation a transshipment scam.
The countries named
Canada, Japan, and the European Union are among the more than 40 countries the White House has identified. The list includes some of the United States' largest and closest trading partners. All of them, by the White House's account, have been enabling the evasion of tariffs Washington imposed on China.
What the accusation says
The word "enabling" in the White House's statement leaves room for interpretation. The accusation does not specify whether the named countries acted deliberately, looked the other way, or simply lacked the inspection capacity to catch re-labeled cargo. That distinction carries real weight in trade diplomacy: a government that passively failed to stop transshipment faces a different set of conversations than one that actively facilitated it. What the accusation establishes is that $60 billion in trade moved in a way that Washington says circumvented its tariff regime on Chinese goods.
Why the physical flow matters
Transshipment works because tariffs create a price difference. When the cost of importing Chinese goods directly into the United States rises high enough, routing those goods through a third country and re-exporting them under that country's trade credentials can become economical. The Trump tariffs on Chinese exports created that kind of cost gap. The scale of the alleged scheme, $60 billion in trade, reflects how wide that gap appears to have become across more than 40 countries.
Whether those countries were active participants or passive conduits is a question the White House's accusation does not resolve. No enforcement timeline or specific penalty was outlined by the White House.
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