For years as I bought cheap flashlights and parts, mostly from China, I was amazed I could buy something for only a few dollars and get free shipping from China. eBay is the same way. I bought a phone case for $1.50 from China and got free shipping. Sometimes there were even stamps on the envelopes and I know shipping is never really free. I figured maybe the Chinese government was subsidizing Chinese businesses by giving them a special low rate in order to increase exports. It certainly was a nice benefit and made the 3 week wait a lot easier to take knowing I was getting a great deal.
In 2018 while the trade war with China was flaring up, there was a story about how you can buy things shipped from China for less than it would cost to ship the item in the United States (even if the item cost was nothing). The article I read at the time said there was an international organization called the Universal Postal Union that set rules on international shipments and its members (everyone) agreed that poor countries like China wouldn’t have to pay high shipping rates to developed countries, which is very progressive of them. So it wasn’t actually that China was subsidizing their businesses, but the United States Post Office that was losing money on the whole deal because they were taking in much less than the price of delivery on Chinese imports. Anyway, the Trump administration was saying this was an unfair system and they were going to withdraw from the UPU and start charging higher rates unless the UPU fixed the problem within a year. Economists seemed baffled at the time because it wasn’t a huge amount of money at stake, but it made sense to me.
It is more than a year since that happened. In the meantime the UPU held an emergency meeting and developed new rules. Whereas currently China pays 20-30% of US domestic shipping rates for items that come into our country, the new rules would allow countries to start charging more in 2021, eventually up to 70% of the domestic shipping rate. Big economies like the US could potentially start charging anything they want as early as July 2020. So maybe cheap goods from China are coming to an end. The US trade representatives touted the victory and said the United States would save $300 million per year. But like with a lot of the tariff stuff, what will really happen is those companies will start charging for shipping to the United States or increase the price of their goods. So the end user will actually pay. Though it makes more sense for me to pay for shipping of my flashlight parts than for the United States Postal Service to pay.