washington — The U.S. Postal Service announced Tuesday that it was suspending acceptance of inbound packages from China and Hong Kong, then reversed that decision Wednesday. The postal service “will continue accepting all international inbound mail and packages from China and Hong Kong Posts,” says a notice on the USPS website. “The USPS and Customs and Border Protection are working closely together to implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery.” The post office’s reversal was part of recent Trump administration tariff actions against China. Mark Kennedy, director of the Wahba Institute for Strategic Competition at the Wilson Center, said the suspension of deliveries presents unprecedented difficulties. “This is not something they’ve done before. It’s not an easy task. It’ll be a big challenge for them to adapt to this change,” he said. Kennedy predicted a backlog in processing all the additional packages requiring scrutiny. “They’re going to ultimately need to collect this tariff from either the retailer that’s shipping it or the person that is receiving it,” he told VOA. A Canadian trucking company owner told Wired magazine that a lot of trucks were turned away at the U.S.-Canadian border in Montana on Tuesday. “A lot of officers were checking the trucks and questioning [drivers], like, ‘Are you sure there are no made-in-China items in there? This is your last chance.’ They were actually going through the trucks and randomly checking the packages,” the trucking company owner, who asked only to be identified as Daniel, told the magazine. [[ The confusion follows a couple of President Donald Trump’s decisions affecting trade with China. On Tuesday, an additional 10% tariff on all imports from China went into effect. The president also closed a long-standing loophole that had allowed exporters to ship, free of duty, packages containing goods worth less than $800 to the United States. A duty is an indirect tax levied on international goods. These changes ordered by Trump “won’t only affect the U.S; they will ripple across global supply chains, impacting global businesses that import U.S. goods, rely on U.S. markets, or source materials from affected regions,” according to Flexport, a supply chain management and logistics company. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have raised concerns in recent years that Chinese e-commerce companies have used the $800 threshold — known as the de minimis provision — to undermine competitors. Chinese e-commerce firms have exploited the high U.S. de minimis level and minimal inspections to increase U.S. market share, according to a 2023 report by the U.S. International Trade Commission. Because such goods do not get much scrutiny by U.S. customs officials, the flood of such Chinese products into the country has raised concerns about safety, and counterfeit goods and fentanyl have slipped through, officials said. “Many are worried that some of the products created by slave labor using Uyghurs in Xinjiang province are coming through here, and the textile industry has been complaining that this is costing them jobs,” said Kennedy, referring to the autonomous territory in northwestern China. In less than 10 years, the number of such exempt shipments into the United States has increased from 139 million in 2015 to more than 1.3 billion last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. The threshold for the exemption was raised in 2016 from $200 to $800. Congress is now likely to reverse direction and lower the dollar amount for the exemption, said Kennedy, a former Republican congressman from the state of Minnesota. Closing the loophole is seen as providing a boost to U.S. domestic e-commerce giants, such as Amazon, eBay and Etsy, competing with Chinese entities, most notably Alibaba, Shein and Temu. A significant portion of Amazon’s business, however, comes from Chinese merchants. China has retaliated against Trump’s orders by imposing 15% tariffs on American coal and liquefied natural gas, along with 10% levies on crude oil, large-engine cars and farm machinery from the United States. Beijing also imposed updated export controls to include some rare metals, and it is launching an anti-monopoly investigation against Google, which is headquartered in California. After the USPS announced it would halt deliveries from China, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, Lin Jian, called on Washington to “stop politicizing economic and trade issues.” China, according to the government official, would continuing taking “necessary measures to firmly safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies.”
