This October, the General Administration of Customs China issued a statement saying that it would stop issuing Generalized System of Preference certificates of origin for goods exported to 32 countries.
Since the announcement, there has been some confusion online over its significance, with some outlets seeming to suggest that these 32 countries had recently decided to revoke China’s GSP status, effective as of December 1, 2021, which is not the case.
Below we provide a brief clarification of the announcement and an overview of China’s current GSP status.
What happened?
On October 25, 2021, the General Administration of Customs China (GACC) released a statement saying that, as of December 1, 2021, it would no longer issue Generalized System of Preference (GSP) certificates of origin (also called ‘Form A’) for goods exported to 32 countries, because these countries no longer offer China GSP status. The 32 countries are composed of the 27 EU member states, the UK, Canada, Turkey, Ukraine, and Liechtenstein.
The misunderstanding that appears to have arisen in some online media is that China was recently removed from these countries’ GSP lists, and that is what prompted the GACC to stop issuing GSP licenses. However, China has actually not received GSP privileges from these countries for many years.
Since 1978, a total of 40 countries have granted China GSP status. The EU ceased granting China GSP privileges on all goods in 2015 after the World Bank upgraded its developing status to an ‘upper-middle income country’. Switzerland and Canada both revoked China’s GSP status in 2014, and Japan followed in 2016.
To read the full article in the China Briefing, please click here.