China's Continuing Evasion of U.S. Antidumping and Countervailing Duty Laws

Scope, methods, and trajectory of the enforcement problem

by the Staff of the Committee to Support US Trade Laws (CSUSTL)

Antidumping and countervailing duty (AD/CVD) orders neutralize two forms of unfair trade: dumping, where goods are sold below fair value, and subsidization, where a foreign government underwrites costs so exporters can undercut U.S. competitors. China is by far the most frequent target of these orders — and the most frequent subject of findings that the orders are being evaded. Customs and Border Protection's own case data shows China implicated in roughly three-quarters of all evasion investigations opened since the modern enforcement statute took effect. The question is no longer whether Chinese exporters and their U.S. importer counterparts are circumventing these duties; the record on that is closed. The live question is whether the problem is growing, and the evidence points clearly toward yes.

The Legal Baseline and the Enforcement Tool

AD/CVD orders are not self-enforcing; they work only if CBP actually collects cash deposits at the border. Congress addressed that gap with the Enforce and Protect Act (EAPA), Title IV of the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015, which gives CBP a time-bound process which is  initiation within 15 days of an allegation, interim measures within 90 days, final determination within 300 to 360 days to investigate whether an importer is evading a specific order.  CBP's own EAPA statistics dashboard makes the China concentration explicit: of 228 cumulative investigations tracked at one recent snapshot, 178 — roughly 78 percent — named China as the possible country of origin, versus 17 for South Korea and 16 for Germany, the next-largest sources. Transshipment was the dominant mechanism, appearing in 207 of the 228 cases, with Malaysia, Mexico, Cambodia, and India the most common pass-through points for goods that are Chinese in substance but relabeled in form.

How the Evasion Actually Works

CBP's case record shows a small set of repeatable schemes, usually layered together: transshipment through Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, or Indonesia, where goods are relabeled with a new country of origin (the dominant scheme by far); undervaluation and misclassification to avoid triggering an order altogether; and shell-company networks.  CBP's largest EAPA case to date, disclosed in mid-2025, involved 23 U.S. importers tied to Chinese shell companies funneling goods through Indonesia, South Korea, and Vietnam, with more than $250 million in evaded duties identified and rising. The incentive driving all three is straightforward: in the low-speed personal transportation vehicle (golf cart) case, AD margins run 119 to 478 percent and CVD margins 31 to 679 percent, and CBP's own findings show circumvention by the named importers intensifying after Commerce published the final orders in August 2025, not before.

Is the Problem Getting Worse?

Order volume is climbing. Commerce's running total of active AD/CVD orders has moved from 542 to 559 to 727 to 769 across successive case announcements over roughly the past two to three years, with China a disproportionate share of new petitions nearly every cycle.

Enforcement volume already exceeds prior capacity. From January 20 to August 8, 2025 alone, CBP uncovered more than $400 million in unpaid duties and identified 89 new cases with reasonable suspicion of evasion — a pace that, annualized, roughly matches the cumulative 228-case total CBP built up over the program's first eight years combined.

Evaders are adapting faster than orders close loopholes. The golf-cart case shows evasion beginning before any order existed, accelerating after Commerce's August 2025 orders, and evolving again by April 2026 to add Vietnam transshipment — against an order barely eight months old. The March 2026 oil country tubular goods determination similarly found undervaluation, misclassification, and Thailand transshipment stacked together, not one technique alone.

Bottom Line

Lost revenue is the most visible cost, but not the most consequential one. Every dollar of evaded duty is a dollar of injury relief Congress authorized and that is not being delivered to the domestic industry the order was built to protect as the golf-cart petitioners put it, evasion "has greatly limited the relief that should be afforded." The asymmetry compounds the problem: EAPA investigations run on 300- to 360-day statutory deadlines and depend on private parties filing detailed allegations, while evasion networks can stand up a new transshipment route or shell-company structure far faster than that.

China remains the dominant source of AD/CVD evasion against U.S. trade remedy law, accounting for roughly three-quarters of all EAPA cases ever opened. The evidence through mid-2026 indicates the problem is worsening on three fronts at once: the underlying order book keeps growing, detected evasion is accelerating in both dollar value and case volume relative to the program's historical pace, and the evasion techniques themselves are becoming more layered and adaptive. CBP's enforcement actions of record-setting case sizes, faster interim measures, expanded live-entry and bond requirements reflect a real and intensifying response, but one still responding to a problem that is outgrowing the architecture built to contain it.

CSUSTL urges Congress to act decisively to close the gap between AD/CVD orders on paper and AD/CVD enforcement in fact. The organization has thrown its support behind two complementary legislative efforts. First, CSUSTL supports the Protecting American Industry from International Trade Crimes Act, bipartisan legislation that would direct the Department of Justice to stand up a dedicated structure for prosecuting trade crimes including fraud, duty evasion, and transshipment that the civil EAPA process alone cannot fully deter. Second, CSUSTL has endorsed the Leveling the Playing Field Act 2.0, which would modernize the underlying trade remedy statute itself by creating a "successive investigations" mechanism to catch repeat offenders who shift production across borders, granting Commerce new authority over cross-border subsidies such as those tied to China's Belt and Road Initiative, and tightening circumvention-inquiry timelines. CSUSTL has also pressed federal agencies directly.  CSUSTL routinely meets with senior officials at Commerce, CBP, the ITC, and USTR to provide detailed technical recommendations for strengthening AD/CVD enforcement, an engagement reflected in the organization's annual roundtable series with agency leadership and its direct correspondence on enforcement-related rulemakings and staffing decisions. Taken together, CSUSTL's position is that Congress must pair new criminal enforcement authority and a modernized statutory toolkit with sustained agency funding and staffing — without all three, EAPA's statutory deadlines and CBP's expanding caseload will continue to run up against an enforcement apparatus that lacks the legal tools and the headcount to keep pace with Chinese evasion schemes.