A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers planned to introduce a bill on Wednesday to eliminate a tariff exemption widely used by e-commerce sellers to send orders from China to U.S. shoppers, one of the sponsors said.
The bill would ban such shipments from China immediately upon enactment, sponsor Republican Senator Bill Cassidy said.
E-commerce sellers such as China-founded, Singapore-based Shein and Temu, a rival owned by PDD Holdings that operates the Chinese ecommerce site Pinduoduo, are big beneficiaries of the exemption.
De minimis shipments have drawn attention at least since 2019, when the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reported it struggled to catch unsafe imports because of the heavy volume of low-value packages.
Under the bill, countries other than China and Russia could keep the exemption by adopting the $800 threshold for their own tariff-free imports.
Persons:
Bill Cassidy, Temu, De, J.D, Vance, Tammy Baldwin, Earl Blumenauer
Organizations:
PDD Holdings, U.S . Consumer Product Safety, Democratic, FedEx, UPS, DHL
Locations:
Washington ,, U.S, China, Singapore, Xingiang, Xinjiang, Russia