TradeLane

According to Announcement of GACC [2019] No.127, to promote trade facilitation, China Customs decided to implement a “two-step declaration” pilot program in some Customs houses under Manzhouli Customs, Hangzhou Customs, Ningbo Customs, Qingdao Customs, Shenzhen Customs, and Huangpu Customs since Aug. 24^th.

President Trump made the surprise announcement yesterday following trade talks in Shanghai this week that he will go forward with a 10% additional tariff on List 4, otherwise known as the remaining $300 Billion in Chinese goods that are not already being hit with an additional tariff.

For most retailers, the focus on trade compliance is usually on store merchandise. Most overlook the fact that the compliance of visual merchandise (furniture, lighting, store décor, etc.) is just as important if they are imported from overseas and the company/brand acts as the importer-of-record to those goods.

The dynamics of trade are changing.

Perhaps this is nothing new, trade has always evolved and changed, but I think we would be hard pressed to find an instance in modern peacetime when trade has been asked to adapt so quickly. TPP, Brexit, NAFTA, and steel tariffs, which would have been the biggest stories just months ago, are now muffled background noise to the rhetoric of a Trade War between two of the world’s most important economies.

China Customs has been steadily making changes to the Customs Declaration Form (CDF) in order to better capture the data they believe is important to compliance enforcement and trade policy. This is the fourth major change to the CDF, which was announced in June and went into effect on August 1, 2018.