America’s tariff wall on Chinese imports looks increasingly like Swiss cheese

“AN EASY WAYUSA to avoid Tariffs? Make or produce your goods and products in the good old . It’s very simple!” In the days when Twitter was the main medium for presidential proclamations, that was what Donald Trump recommended to companies using China as a manufacturing base. He was half right: avoiding tariffs has proved to be quite simple. What he failed to see, though, was that avoidance is an eminently viable strategy for companies staying put in China.The scale of avoidance is, to use a non-technical term, huge. A giant discrepancy that has opened up between Chinese and American trade data provides a window onto the tariff-dodging that has occurred over the past three years since on Chinese products. Much of it involves importers taking advantage of legal loopholes; some of it appears to be outright evasion, with companies lying to customs inspectors.