Basically, the UPU assumes that a country will send about the same amount of international mail that it receives. There may be an imbalance between any two countries, but in aggregate, it assumes that these imbalances will net out. Furthermore, the UPU sets rates based on the sending country's costs. Since China was classified as a developing country, it was very cheap for Chinese to send mail into the international mail stream. This was justified because China's last mile delivery for mail received from other countries is also very cheap.
However, with the huge US-China trade imbalance, these assumptions no longer hold. U.S. shippers were at a major disadvantage because of this.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis...
However here in Norway VAT is being introduced on all packages now, which is going to cut Aliexpress down quite a bit. Previously it was duty free below €35 combined value & postage.
CR2032 batteries are a common item with an order of magnitude markup (20c each vs multiple dollars here).
If you order electronic components from China, you're never quite sure what you get. You might get the stuff that failed QA testing at the factory, or second-hand stuff that's soldered off some old PCB. Or sometimes you get something else entirely... I ordered some LM35 temperature sensors in the TO-92 package, and got some cheap transistors instead. Case was TO-92, markings where as expected for LM35, but a quick test betrayed what was really inside.
In this case I expected them to be fake, based on the price, I just wanted to see what I got. But even if the part is appropriately priced you can't be sure.
China sells a lot of older stock via AliX, so newer chips are hard to find and might be near the same price, but older clonable classics like a 2n7k are dirt cheap and just as good.
The UPU agreement on terminal dues sets a sliding scale based on the sending country's level of economic development - less developed economies pay less, while more developed economies pay more. The logic behind this is fairly obvious, in helping less-developed economies to fully participate in the international mail system.
The problem for the USPS is that they are obliged to handle large volumes of mail originating in China, but the terminal dues for lightweight items are substantially below their cost of delivery. The handling of these items is effectively cross-subsidised by USPS customers.
The US is demanding that terminal dues should be set at a flat rate based on domestic postal costs, with the possibility of direct subsidies for less developed postal systems. This would partly (though not completely) reduce the competitive advantage for Chinese e-commerce sellers.
The Universal Postal Union rules for how international mail is paid for were established at a time when most mail was letters, and most letters would need a reply by letter.
So on average, every international letter delivered in Country X behalf of the Country Y postal service would be balanced by one letter delivered in Country Y on behalf of the Country X postal service.
No exchange of money between countries needed, and if a country had daily/weekly mail delivery or dense/sparse population or expensive/cheap postal employees or rich/poor citizens or tax/subsidy on post or efficient/inefficient processing that was no other country's business, so long as the number of letters balanced.
In the modern age, the number of letters doesn't balance, because no-one places their AliExpress order by mail.
For years the United States has protested the cheap UPU rates that China gets. But the UPU still classifies it as a "developing" nation.
China is the world's second-largest economy. It doesn't need or deserve the artificially cheap rates anymore. China shouldn't pay less to send packages overseas than countries in Africa.
By leaving the UPU, the United States can set correct prices.
It's one of those situations where China claims to be a developing nation when it suits its needs, and then claims to be a developed nation when it suits its needs.
If you're going to play in the big leagues, you have to play by big league rules.
China is a undeveloped nation. There are still parts of China where people live on under $40 a day.
Developed nations have a moral obligation to help undeveloped nations
Also, is there any reasonable metric by which China is not a developing economy?
Here's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
Here's another: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
That's not what I'd call "reasonable." You have to normalize by population.
You can’t even compare cities to cities, since even an entity like Beijing is structured and defined so differently from how we define a city like NYC or Chicago.
This is why I stressed the ethnocentrism of it all. It’s a country that has developed tremendously but not at all in the same way that we have traditionally defined development in the western sense, and a lot of that comes from its size, its historic dynastic cultures and their political structures, and its population (count and local densities).
I haven't ever heard of the Chinese government claiming China to be a developed country - that was one of the original contentions above. I also think that by any reasonable metric, China is a developing country. There are pockets that are much more developed than others, but the country as a whole is still very far behind developed countries.
The UPU has been around for decades, but it's only been since 2010 that the USPS has formalized the process with the "ePacket" shipping.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/...
If the USPS loses money, which it has been every year recently, who pays the difference?
In any case this kind of subsidy is not necessarily bad for developing countries, and it was probably instrumental in China's phenomenal economic growth, but it is now in the conquering superpower category, it's time it loses this advantage.