[Olog-hai]

If that were true, then it’d be just as cheap to ship in the other direction across the Pacific. But it is not.

[Alberta's Child]

You’d have to show me some numbers to back that up. In all of my experience, shipping rates from the U.S. to Asia are actually LOWER than the Asia-USA rates. This is because the trade imbalance means many shipping containers would otherwise be returning to Asia empty, so ocean carriers offer steep discounts on back-haul shipments.

[Zhang Fei]

[If that were true, then it’d be just as cheap to ship in the other direction across the Pacific. But it is not.]

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I have it on good authority from a casual conversation with someone in the food processing biz that it is actually way cheaper to ship stuff by the container-load from the US to China than the other way around. That’s why so much low-value recycling scrap got shipped to China. The reason shipping rates to China from the US are so cheap? A lot of ships head back to China with empty shipping containers. Better to fill it with something, since it doesn’t cost much more, fuel-wise, to ship loaded containers to China vs empty ones. Surprisingly, a CNN reporter has actually done the legwork and reported on this fact:

https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/11/news/china-scrap-ban-us-recycling/index.html