Send money to China from the Americas

The United States and Canada import from China with a hard currency and mature banking behind them. Foreign exchange is bought at a screen price on any Tuesday afternoon, the importer's constraint is price and timing rather than access, and the questions arriving from those two markets are what a yuan invoice really costs and who is allowed to receive it. Mexico sits close to that description: the peso floats freely, and the friction there is commercial rather than regulatory.

Argentina and Brazil are a different conversation, and pretending otherwise would do nobody a favour. In Argentina, access to foreign currency has been rationed and repriced often enough that importers plan around the rule before the rate; in Brazil, the real can move several percent in the time a supplier takes to confirm an order, so the number agreed on Monday and the number funded on Thursday are not the same number. The route into China does not change for either: the same yuan into the same kind of account. What changes is your side of it — and this route exempts nobody from their own country's rules on moving money abroad. If it ever appeals mainly because it looks like a way around something at home, stop there: that is a conversation for your bank and your accountant, not a reason to press start.

A large share of this region's China spend starts on Alibaba or 1688, and the question that follows is almost always the same: the supplier has quoted, the platform's own payment methods are sitting there, and the same supplier has also sent a bank account. We are not affiliated with Alibaba, with 1688, or with any marketplace. What we do is the bank leg — yuan into the supplier's own company account on the mainland, from your USDT or USDC balance, whichever platform the conversation started on.

The part worth being plain about is what you leave behind by paying off-platform. Trade Assurance, escrow, dispute handling and any buyer protection attached to an order placed inside the marketplace belong to the platform and not to us, and a direct bank transfer sits outside all of it: a sensible choice with an established supplier, a bad habit on a first order from a stranger. Nothing here is published as a fixed band either. The smallest invoices we price sit at around 55 CNY and the largest at around 65,000 CNY, with every quote taken off live liquidity at the moment it is asked for — so a sample box off 1688 and a full production run each get a number.