Shipping is also subsidized by all of us on this end. International postage agreements were never intended to cover a massive unidirectional deluge of low-value packages. The costs of all the additional logistics are ultimately externalized to the taxpayer, and China totally exploits this. It’s exactly the reason the EU set a tariff for low-value parcels in particular.
It's not hardly an exploit when the taxpayer is the one benefiting
This amounts to a subsidy of Chinese manufacturing over local manufacturing.
I can’t see how a market distortion is a net benefit to the importing country.
It seems self-destructive.
If everyone bought from Temu then the net benefit would be zero relative to just including it in the price right?
In practice the value flows from people who don't buy cheap crap from China to people who do.
One might even refer to it as a "public service".
It’s a classic negative externality. Not every taxpayer partakes in this pathological consumerism.
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