China Freight, Explained Properly
How rates are actually built, what the destination will charge, and which decisions are worth making before the cargo leaves the factory — written by the people who quote these lanes.
The answers we end up giving on the phone, written down
Every article here started as a real question from a real quotation — why a rate doubled between the estimate and the invoice, whether a shipment should go in its own container, what the destination is going to charge on arrival. Nothing is written to hit a word count.
The order follows the order of a shipment. First the mode, because air, ocean and rail are priced on completely different arithmetic and picking the wrong one is the most expensive mistake available. Then the chargeable quantity: air bills on the greater of actual weight and volume divided by 6000, express uses 5000, and ocean LCL bills on the greater of one cubic meter or one tonne. Most "the price changed" conversations end at that sentence.
After that comes the trade term, which decides who owns the cargo and the cost at each step, and then the destination — the tariff heading, whether import VAT sits inside the number you were quoted, and the filings that cannot be fixed retrospectively once the vessel has sailed.
Where an article refers to a lane we actually price, it links to that lane’s rate page rather than describing it in the abstract, so you can check the number against the argument. The rate pages carry live tariffs; these articles carry the reasoning behind them.
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