The White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy’s August 2026 report, ‘The Great Transshipment Scam,’ names India among the “Diversified Scale Leaders” of a 40-country network allegedly helping China evade the US tariffs. The claim rests on a striking chart: as China’s share of US imports fell after the 2018 Section 301 tariffs, the combined import share of India and 39 other countries rose in near mirror image. The report calls this “unlikely to be explained by chance alone.” For India, the evidence does not hold up.
A conflation at the core. The report flags any product where China’s US import share falls, a third country’s China imports rise, and that third country’s US exports rise—a correlation that cannot distinguish industrial upgrading from origin-laundering. It also conflates legitimate transshipment with illegal transshipment. Routing a genuinely transformed good through a third country is ordinary trade; falsely claiming that country as the origin to dodge duties is fraud. The report’s definition of “China-linked” goods—anything carrying “indicia” of Chinese content—risks capturing what global-value-chain integration is supposed to produce. Countries import Chinese components and add their own value before re-export. That is not evasion; it is manufacturing.
