Sri Lanka has been named in a White House report that argues more than 40 countries are being used to route Chinese goods into the United States and avoid tariffs.
The report, The Great Transshipment Scam, was released on 13 August by the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. It contends that the restructuring of global supply chains since the 2018 tariffs on Chinese goods has let products from higher-tariff jurisdictions reach US buyers through intermediary countries.
Where Sri Lanka appears
Sri Lanka is mentioned twice, in both cases within a list rather than as the subject of any individual finding.
It is placed in the report’s third tier, which the document titles “Small, Opportunistic Chinese Targets” — smaller economies said to account for lower absolute volumes but to hold what the report calls weak-link advantages. Those include low-cost labour, free zones, port access, bonded warehousing, preferential US access and limited customs enforcement capacity. Twenty-four countries appear in that tier, among them Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
Sri Lanka also appears in a table setting out what the report calls the functional architecture of a “shadow transshipment network”, grouped with Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos and the Philippines as “Southeast Asian Microhubs” — a cluster associated with light assembly, export-processing zones, relabelling and re-export of China-linked goods.
The first tier, “Diversified Scale Leaders”, covers Canada, the European Union, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan; the second names Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam.
No specific allegation, investigation, enforcement action or financial estimate relating directly to Sri Lanka is set out in the document.
The numbers, and the caveats
The report reviews five estimates of transshipment exposure, ranging from about $40 billion to $303 billion a year depending on method. It uses roughly $75 billion, produced by the firm Exiger, as its central case, and says the figures are not additive.
On that central case, it projects around 450,000 displaced US jobs and $19 billion to $26 billion in lost federal revenue, describing these as model-based estimates.
The document also acknowledges that shifts in trade patterns do not automatically indicate illegal activity, and may reflect legitimate investment, manufacturing expansion and supply-chain diversification. It proposes expanding US customs enforcement through artificial-intelligence systems that analyse shipment and routing data for tariff-evasion risk.
Sri Lanka was placed in the lower 10% US tariff tier in July, down from a proposed 44%.
