My experience with China customs is that if custom officer feels like taxing you 15%/25%/45% on this particular day, they will find a way to tax you. Unless.

What the law specifies is not always the lived reality.

In Argentina you have to pay 50% of the market value for all electronic imports and you will have to deal with customs officers (who will usually try to make your day quite miserable if you don't "tip" em)

I wasn't even able to send anything from abroad to my colleagues in Vietnam. We make electronics + firmware + backend API's and he needed a few Samsung phones + electronics to test; you can only ship new phones sealed in boxes there and electronics need bucket loads of paperwork and then pay $. Never had that issue with China, but it's 2+ years ago since I last had to ship anything there though.

Is worth mentioning regarding Argentina and this HN submission in particular that the government is aiming to provide a laptop to every secondary student, they are build (assembled is probably more accurate) in Argentina and they come with a Linux distribution maintained by them called Huayra. I think that is pretty awesome for such a poor country. Customs in general are annoying, I was arriving to Germany from the US with a new MacBook, I was stopped and they ask me where did I buy the computer, I had bought in Germany, so they say it was fine, they told me to send a copy of the invoice to them, which I did. They were just making sure I paid the taxes there. From what I heard from Argentineans bribing is very common, but they somehow think people taking the bribes are the only corrupt but not people bribing, or avoiding taxes.

Germans also have been somehow ok with paying bribes: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-siemens-executive-plea... https://www.dw.com/en/ex-siemens-manager-pleads-guilty-in-us... In the 90s, those bribes would have been tax deductible in Germany: https://archive.is/Eit0f

> From what I heard from Argentineans bribing is very common, but they somehow think people taking the bribes are corrupt but not people bribing, or avoiding taxes. Wait this isn't the case everywhere. I thought this how corruption laws are made.

If the officer feels like doing that, they will. That's sadly the case in many countries.

Was the case for me when I flew back to Germany with my music instruments. They would not listen to any reason but forced me to pay to get the instruments that are my property back. Thieves.