The Cato Institute has published an assessment with a blunt conclusion: President Donald Trump's tariffs have pushed US companies back into China rather than away from it.

That claim cuts against the stated objective of the tariff programme. The measures were designed to force decoupling — to price Chinese goods out of the American market and push US importers toward domestic manufacturing or alternative sourcing countries. Instead, the study's title states the opposite outcome: US companies are returning to Chinese suppliers.

For shippers and forwarders, the finding matters because it speaks to the resilience of trans-Pacific trade flows despite years of punitive duties. If US buyers keep gravitating back to China, demand on Asia–US lanes remains structurally anchored to Chinese origin ports — Shanghai, Ningbo, Shenzhen — regardless of tariff policy in Washington.

The commercial logic is straightforward. Tariffs raise the landed cost of Chinese goods, but they do not eliminate the advantages that made China the default sourcing hub in the first place: scale, integrated supply chains, component depth and production speed. When alternative suppliers in Southeast Asia or elsewhere cannot match those fundamentals, the tariff becomes a cost of doing business rather than a deterrent.

For carriers, that dynamic supports continued deployment of capacity on China–US services even as trade policy whipsaws. For BCOs, it means tariff exposure is a pricing and budgeting problem as much as a sourcing one — and one that has evidently not been solved by shifting origins.

For forwarders and customs brokers, the persistence of China sourcing keeps attention on tariff engineering: classification, valuation and first-sale strategies that legally reduce duty exposure on Chinese-origin cargo. Demand for that work rises when clients return to Chinese suppliers rather than abandon them.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank long opposed to protectionist trade policy, frames the result as evidence of policy failure. The argument is that market forces — not tariff schedules — determine where US companies buy, and that the tariffs have delivered higher costs without delivering the promised supply-chain realignment.

The finding also carries implications for the near-shoring and friend-shoring narratives that have shaped freight-market expectations since the first rounds of Section 301 duties. Investment announcements in Mexico, India and Vietnam have been real, but the study's headline suggests they have not been sufficient to pull US import demand away from Chinese manufacturing at scale.

Shippers planning 2025 procurement should read the result as a caution against assuming tariff-driven trade diversion is permanent or linear. If US companies are indeed moving back to China, capacity allocations, rate negotiations and routing decisions on trans-Pacific lanes should reflect Chinese origin dominance — not an anticipated structural shift to alternative origins.

Whether the pattern holds depends on the trajectory of US trade policy. Further tariff escalation would raise the cost of that return to China; a rollback would remove the penalty entirely. The Cato analysis signals that, at least for now, American buyers have voted with their purchase orders — and they have voted for China.