In a report, the United States has accused more than 40 countries, including India, of participating in a shadow network that helps China evade steep American tariffs. Officials also outlined plans to use artificial intelligence to spot and act on each shipment, reports added. However, India is yet to respond to this acquisition.
According to a report titled ‘The Great Transshipment Scam’, the top trade advisor Peter Navarro said the US would use artificial intelligence enabled “Detective Border” to detect such shipments and take action against them. He added that the practice had become more common after 2018 when Trump administration imposed Section 301 tariffs of China i what it described as unfair trade practice.
The ‘Detective Border’ would support U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) by integrating shipment data, routing histories, product classifications, ownership relationships, production-capacity indicators, anomaly detection, computer vision, and other analytical tools.
As per the report, the annual value of illegally transshipped goods value pegged between USD 40 billion and USD 303 billion, depending on the method and the definition used.
“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.
Besides India, countries that include many of America’s largest trading partners range from Mexico and Canada on U.S. land borders to the European Union, Japan and South Korea in the Asian subcontinent are also named in the report. He claimed that China and its state-supported manufacturers and trading firms to push goods into jurisdictions with cheap labor, weak customs oversight, permissive free zones, or preferential U.S. trade access.
In regards to Indian trade, the report said, Pune-Gujarat-China production belt absorbs pumps and compressors, affecting industrial supply chains in Cincinnati, Dayton and Columbus.The report emphasized that the objective was to improve CBP’s ability to distinguish legitimate nearshoring and foreign investment from legal pass through trade, identify high-risk shipments, and convert analytical findings into interdiction, duty collection, penalties, and exclusion.