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U.S. Customs to Require Postal Code on Chinese Imports
Beginning March 18, 2023, all imports into the United States, originating from China, will be required to provide U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with a postal code. The postal code will need to identify the location, or address, of the factory where the imported goods have originated from.
Why? This change follows the investigation of forced labor camps and factories in the Xinjiang region of China. The People's Republic of China has detained more than one million Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities in China's western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). It is estimated that over 100,000 Uyghurs and other ethnic minority ex-detainees in China may be working in conditions of forced labor. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) established a protocol that all goods, merchandise, and articles produced, manufactured, or mined (in whole or in part) in Xinjiang, are prohibited under 19 U.S.C. § 1307 and are not entitled to entry into the United States. Additionally, any goods manufactured, produced, or mined by entities on the UFLPA Entity List are also subject to this presumption. Under the UFLPA Region Alert, deployed March 18th, all entries from China on CBP’s Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system will go through the following three authentications:
- Postal code will now be a required field.
- Users will receive an error message if the provided postal code is not a valid Chinese postal code.
- Users will receive a warning message when a postal code associated with the XUAR region is provided.
The CBP ACE platform will provide these notifications when the manufacturer’s country of origin, for an entry, is the People’s Republic of China (CN). Additionally, a notification will appear when CN is selected as the manufacturer’s country of origin when a Manufacturer Identification (MID) code is created, and/or when an existing MID with CN as its country of origin is updated. The UFLPA urges that all supply chain workers should use their due diligence to ensure they are following current trade laws and regulations when declaring where goods and shipments are originating from.
Contributor: Lindsay Swanson
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Sources:
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/against-their-will-the-situation-in-xinjiang