Beijing says 63 countries now enjoy zero-tariff access to the world’s second-largest import market, as customs chiefs pledge to widen the net through 2030 in a pointed counterpoint to Western protectionism
Peacock Tariff Consulting | International Trade Desk | July 24, 2026
BEIJING, July 24, 2026. China has now extended zero-tariff treatment to imports from 63 countries, the head of the country’s customs authority announced this week, capping a rapid expansion of duty-free access that Beijing is positioning as the centrepiece of its claim to leadership of the developing world’s trading system. Sun Meijun, who leads the General Administration of Customs, told a press conference in Beijing on Wednesday that the authority will continue to expand diversified markets during the 2026 to 2030 period, signalling that the list of beneficiary countries is set to grow further, according to the state news agency Xinhua.
The announcement, delivered as Washington rolled out a new wave of tariffs on 60 trading partners, was calibrated for maximum contrast. While the United States moves to double-digit duties on virtually all of its import base, China is advertising an open door to the poorest economies on earth, and increasingly to middle-income commodity exporters as well. The two policies, announced in the same week, capture the divergent directions in which the world’s two largest economies are pulling the global trading system.
What Beijing announced
Sun’s remarks confirmed the scale of a programme that has grown in stages over the past two years. China first granted zero-tariff treatment on all tariff lines to the world’s least developed countries with which it has diplomatic relations, a policy that took effect in December 2024 and made China the first major developing economy to offer such blanket access. In May of this year, Beijing went significantly further, implementing expanded zero-tariff treatment for imports from all 53 African countries with which it maintains diplomatic ties, extending duty-free access beyond the least developed tier to include middle-income African economies such as Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.
The 63-country figure cited by Sun this week encompasses those African states along with least developed countries in Asia and the Pacific. To make the preferences usable in practice, the customs administration has introduced a suite of facilitation measures, including risk-based customs management, integrated market access procedures and expanded green channels for agricultural and food products, Sun said. The green lanes matter particularly for perishable exports such as fruit, seafood and cut flowers, where clearance delays can destroy a consignment’s value faster than any tariff.
The early trade data suggest the policy is moving volumes. China’s trade with Africa increased 19.6 percent year on year in the first half of 2026, Sun told reporters, a growth rate far outpacing China’s overall trade expansion. Chinese officials have separately reported surging imports of African agricultural products since the May expansion, with coffee, cocoa, sesame, citrus and beef among the categories recording strong gains.
Looking ahead, Sun said the customs authority will advance the implementation of opening-up measures and high-standard trade agreements, and improve alignment in customs procedures, quarantine rules and rules of origin. That last item is significant: rules of origin determine whether a product genuinely qualifies for zero-duty treatment, and loose or opaque origin rules have historically been the weak point of preference schemes worldwide.
The strategic backdrop
The zero-tariff programme cannot be read in isolation from the broader trade war environment. Since early 2025, the United States has imposed successive rounds of tariffs on Chinese goods and on most other trading partners, culminating this week in new duties of 10 to 12.5 percent on 60 economies tied to findings under Section 301 investigations concerning forced labour in supply chains. China’s foreign ministry responded sharply to the latest American measures, with spokesman Lin Jian saying Beijing “opposes all forms of unilateral tariffs” and warning that “tariff wars and trade wars do not serve any parties’ interests.”
Against that backdrop, the zero-tariff policy serves several purposes at once. It cements China’s role as the dominant trading partner for Africa, a position it has held for more than a decade and a half, and deepens the goodwill Beijing draws on in multilateral forums where African votes matter. It diversifies China’s own supply of food and raw materials at a time when its purchases from the United States and some other Western suppliers have become hostage to geopolitics. And it allows Beijing to present itself as the defender of the open, multilateral trading order, a framing Chinese officials deploy constantly in speeches at the World Trade Organization.
Trade lawyers note that the policy also raises genuinely novel questions of WTO law. A widely discussed analysis published on the European Journal of International Law’s blog asked whether China’s Africa-wide scheme stretches the Enabling Clause, the WTO provision that permits developed and developing countries to grant non-reciprocal preferences to developing economies. Because the clause requires that preferences among developing countries be generalised and non-discriminatory in certain respects, a scheme confined to African countries with which Beijing has diplomatic relations sits in contested legal territory. The exclusion of Eswatini, the one African state that recognises Taiwan, underlines the political conditionality embedded in the programme. No WTO member has so far launched a formal challenge, and in the current enfeebled state of the organisation’s dispute settlement system few expect one.
What it means for exporters in beneficiary countries
For exporters across Africa and the least developed world, the practical question is whether zero tariffs translate into actual orders. The experience of earlier preference schemes, from the EU’s Everything But Arms arrangement to the American African Growth and Opportunity Act, suggests that tariff elimination is necessary but not sufficient. Sanitary and phytosanitary approvals, product registration, logistics costs and buyer relationships typically determine outcomes at least as much as duty rates.
That is why the customs facilitation measures announced alongside the tariff preferences deserve attention. China has been signing protocols admitting specific agricultural products from specific countries at an accelerating pace, and the integrated market access procedures Sun described are intended to compress the time between a tariff preference existing on paper and a product actually clearing a Chinese port. For a Kenyan avocado grower or an Ethiopian coffee cooperative, the binding constraint has usually been quarantine approval rather than the tariff line.
The programme is already reshaping certain commodity flows. African beef exporters, notably in southern Africa, see an opening in China’s vast protein market at the very moment Beijing has imposed safeguard measures on beef from its largest established suppliers. Chinese tariff-rate quotas and new safeguard duties announced at the end of last year apply additional 55 percent tariffs to beef imports beyond annual thresholds from major suppliers such as Brazil, Australia and the United States, while the zero-tariff scheme gives many African producers duty-free entry. Analysts caution that African supply capacity remains a fraction of what Brazil or Australia can ship, but the direction of preference is unmistakable.
For Asian least developed countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, the scheme reinforces China’s pull as an export destination for garments, footwear and agricultural goods, and complements the tariff-free access many of those countries already enjoy under the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Bangladesh’s looming graduation from least developed country status makes the terms of its future access to the Chinese market a live question for its garment industry, the second largest in the world.
How China’s scheme compares
The zero-tariff programme invites comparison with the preference schemes that developed economies have operated for decades, and the comparison is increasingly favourable to Beijing on the dimension that matters most to exporters: certainty.
The European Union’s Everything But Arms arrangement grants least developed countries duty-free, quota-free access to the EU market, and its broader Generalised Scheme of Preferences extends reduced tariffs to a wider set of developing economies. But EBA access comes with conditionality on human rights and governance that has seen preferences suspended, most prominently for Cambodia in 2020, and graduation rules that remove benefits as countries develop. The United States allowed its Generalized System of Preferences to lapse in 2020 and has left it expired for years, while the African Growth and Opportunity Act, the cornerstone of American trade preference for Africa, has been subject to periodic renewal cliffs and country suspensions that make long-term investment against it hazardous. This year’s American tariff wave has further eroded the value of any US preference by stacking new duties on top of the system.
China’s scheme, by contrast, is unilateral, unconditional in its published form, and now embedded in the customs administration’s five-year planning horizon through 2030. Its conditionality is political rather than legal, tied to diplomatic recognition of Beijing rather than to governance benchmarks, which developing country governments often find easier to live with, whatever outside critics say. For an African finance ministry weighing where to direct export promotion resources, the Chinese preference now looks like the most stable of the three major schemes, a remarkable inversion of the situation a decade ago.
The volumes remain lopsided, and that is the standing critique. China sells to Africa roughly twice what it buys, and its imports from the continent remain concentrated in oil, metals and ores, which entered duty-free long before the preference scheme existed. The zero-tariff policy is best understood as an attempt to shift the composition of African exports toward agriculture and light manufactures at the margin, and the early agricultural trade data suggest at least some movement. Whether it can meaningfully dent the structural imbalance is a question that will take years to answer.
The view from the beneficiary side
Governments across Africa have broadly welcomed the expansion while pressing for the complementary measures that would let their producers use it. The African Continental Free Trade Area secretariat has encouraged members to negotiate sanitary protocols with Beijing in parallel, since a tariff preference without a quarantine protocol is a door that is unlocked but still closed. Agricultural exporters in East Africa report that protocol negotiations that once took five years or more have accelerated markedly, with Chinese authorities processing approvals for avocado, chilli, sesame and livestock products at unprecedented pace.
There are also voices of caution. Manufacturing advocates in Africa worry that easier access to the Chinese market for raw agricultural goods, combined with continued Chinese export strength in manufactures, could deepen rather than diversify the existing pattern of trade. Economists at African think tanks have urged governments to negotiate local processing commitments alongside market access, pointing to the difference between exporting raw cashew and roasted, packaged product. The test of the scheme, they argue, is not whether African exports to China grow, but whether value-added African exports grow.
Trade negotiators from middle-income beneficiaries note a further subtlety: because the scheme is unilateral, Beijing can adjust it at will, and nothing in WTO law would give a beneficiary recourse if preferences were narrowed. That is true of every unilateral preference scheme, but it means the scheme’s durability rests on China’s strategic calculus rather than on binding commitments. So far, every revision has been in the direction of expansion.
Implications for global trade flows
For multinational importers and supply chain managers, China’s zero-tariff expansion cuts in several directions. Companies sourcing African raw materials for processing in China, from cocoa for grinding to sesame for crushing, will find landed costs lower and customs friction reduced, strengthening China’s position as the processing hub for African commodities. That, in turn, entrenches a pattern that African policymakers themselves have long criticised, in which the continent exports raw materials and imports finished goods. Beijing has sought to blunt that critique by pairing the tariff scheme with pledges to encourage Chinese investment in African processing capacity.
Western exporters, meanwhile, confront a Chinese market in which their goods increasingly face a structural cost disadvantage. American agricultural products carry retaliatory and safeguard duties, European goods in several categories face anti-dumping measures, and now dozens of developing-country competitors enjoy zero-duty access. An Australian or Brazilian beef producer paying over-quota safeguard tariffs competes against duty-free product from preference beneficiaries. A European exporter of processed foods faces duty-paid competition from African suppliers shipping duty-free.
The scheme also matters for the geography of transhipment and origin compliance. As margins between preferential and non-preferential duty rates widen, the incentive to misdeclare origin grows with them. China’s customs authority has signalled that it intends to police rules of origin closely, and importers routing goods through beneficiary countries should expect scrutiny of whether substantial transformation genuinely occurred there. Trade compliance professionals will recognise the pattern from every preference scheme in history: the larger the preference, the larger the enforcement apparatus that eventually follows.
Commodities to watch
A handful of product stories will reveal how much commercial substance the scheme delivers over the next year.
Coffee and cocoa are the bellwethers for African agriculture. Chinese coffee consumption has been growing at double-digit rates from a low base, and Ethiopian, Kenyan, Ugandan and Rwandan exporters now enjoy duty-free entry into that expanding market while traditional suppliers face standard rates. Chinese roasters and beverage chains have begun sourcing African beans in visible volumes, and Ethiopian officials have cited coffee as their fastest-growing export line to China. Cocoa follows a similar logic for Ghana and Ivory Coast, with Chinese chocolate consumption rising and processing capacity expanding.
Sesame and oilseeds have the longest track record: China was already the dominant buyer of Ethiopian and Sudanese sesame before the scheme, and zero duties consolidate flows that political instability in producing regions has periodically disrupted. Beef is the newest frontier, where southern African producers with foot-and-mouth-free zones are working through quarantine protocols to reach a market that consumes more beef than any other and has just constrained its largest suppliers with safeguard quotas. Seafood from coastal West and East Africa, citrus from South Africa and Egypt, and cotton from the Sahel round out the categories where preference margins are commercially meaningful.
On the industrial side, the scheme’s impact is more speculative but worth monitoring. Duty-free treatment covers manufactured goods as well as commodities, so in principle a garment factory in Addis Ababa or a components plant in Nairobi can serve the Chinese market without duties. Chinese manufacturers have invested in African industrial parks for years with exports to Europe and America in mind; the zero-tariff scheme adds the Chinese home market as a potential destination for the same plants, an option that becomes more interesting as tariffs complicate the American route.
The scheme interacts with China’s other trade architecture in ways that compound its effect. Many beneficiary countries participate in Belt and Road logistics corridors that cut shipping times to Chinese ports, and the least developed Asian beneficiaries overlap with the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, allowing exporters to choose whichever preference regime offers better terms line by line. Chinese development lenders finance the cold chains, ports and border posts that determine whether perishable preferences are usable. No Western preference scheme arrives bundled with comparable infrastructure finance.
There remain real limits to what the programme can achieve. China’s import demand is soft by historical standards as its economy contends with a prolonged property downturn and cautious consumers. Zero tariffs cannot conjure demand that is not there, and African exporters’ gains in percentage terms start from a low base. Nor does duty-free market access address the deeper imbalance in China’s trade with Africa, which remains heavily weighted toward Chinese manufactured exports.
What to watch next
Several indicators over the coming months will show whether the scheme is deepening or plateauing. The first is the protocol pipeline: each new sanitary agreement admitting a specific product from a specific country converts paper preference into shippable trade, and the pace of signings has become the single best measure of the programme’s momentum. The second is the beneficiary list itself: Sun’s framing of market diversification through 2030 implies further additions, and trade officials in several Asian and Latin American developing countries have begun asking publicly why zero-tariff treatment stops at Africa and the least developed tier. Any extension to larger developing economies would multiply the scheme’s commercial significance and sharpen the WTO law questions that already surround it.
The third indicator is enforcement behaviour. As volumes grow, so will origin fraud attempts, and the credibility of the scheme with Chinese domestic producers depends on customs keeping third-country transshipment out of the duty-free channel. The fourth is the interaction with China’s import demand cycle: a durable recovery in Chinese consumption would amplify every preference in the scheme, while continued softness would cap gains regardless of tariff treatment. And the fifth is the response from other major economies, whether Washington’s retrenchment from trade preferences continues, and whether Brussels moves to modernise its own schemes in response to the competitive pressure Beijing is applying in the contest for developing-world trade relationships.
But as a statement of direction, delivered in the same week Washington raised duties on nearly every one of its trading partners, the announcement was unambiguous. China is betting that openness to the developing world, however selective and strategically motivated, will pay dividends in influence, supply security and export markets for decades to come. The customs authority’s pledge to keep widening the scheme through 2030 suggests the bet is only getting larger.