Not good news, but we've seen multiple people get time sensitive packages "caught up" in customs with no way to expedite them save paying some sort of tax. The more valuable the shipment and the more urgently you seem to want it the more likely that this will happen. And some were never delivered at all.

Unfortunately, if you use services like FedEx or DHL they don't take responsibility for things that enter the black hole of customs, while it also seems to be a signal to customs that this is a potentially important shipment. Paper documents *do* seem to go through without getting held up though.

Anyway, if you have the time to try it out, I'd suggest looking at insuring the shipments but using regular mail. It might take a couple of days longer on first glance, but it's probably also less likely to get flagged as a valuable shipment. And Chinese names are better than foreign names for avoiding this problem too.