Taipei, Taiwan – As the United States struggled to come to terms with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday, factories on the other side of the world in China were already hard at work producing commemorative T-shirts.
Just hours after the shooting at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao was selling t-shirts emblazoned with an Associated Press photo of a bloody, fist-clenched Trump being escorted by U.S. Marshals. Secret.
Featuring slogans like “Fight! To fight! Fight!” and “Shooting makes me stronger!” Below the image, some t-shirts were selling for just $4 each.
Retailers told Chinese media they were surprised by how quickly the shirts were snapped up.
“We put the T-shirts on Taobao as soon as we saw the news about the shooting, even though we hadn’t printed them yet, and within three hours we saw more than 2,000 orders from China and the US,” said Li, a Taobao supplier. Jinwei told the South China Morning Post that it is owned by Taobao’s parent company, Alibaba.
On Monday, Beijing’s censorship apparatus had scrubbed the T-shirts from internet search results in China.
While products may be restricted in China, Chinese manufacturers still hope to cash in on the cultural moment abroad – a skill they have become adept at with the rise of sites like Temu and fast fashion retailer Shein.
Both Temu and Shein work with thousands of suppliers and manufacturers to quickly produce small runs of inexpensive clothing and other items to suit the whims of overseas consumers.
On Temu, an e-commerce platform popular outside China due to rock-bottom prices on household and electronics products, dozens of versions of Trump T-shirts are still selling for as little as $8.49 each, in many cases featuring U.S.-focused T-shirts . slogans like “Make America Great Again.”
“It’s a vivid story that shows how China’s supply chain evolves under the ‘Internet celebrity economy,’ a business model that aims to capitalize on online traffic,” said Yue Su, lead China economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit , to Al Jazeera.
“A supply chain prepared to respond quickly to breaking news or other highly influential social events is needed so that retailers or manufacturers can capitalize on temporary consumer excitement.”
Responding to cultural moments and trends has indeed become a matter of survival for many manufacturers in the face of China’s economic slowdown, Su said.
China’s economy grew just 4.7% year on year in the second quarter of 2024, according to data released on Monday by the National Bureau of Statistics, better than the COVID-19 pandemic-era performance but much lower. slower than in previous decades.
China’s real estate sector, once one of the engines of the country’s economic growth, is suffering a long and painful contraction, while consumption is unable to make up the difference as consumers hold on to their savings.
Retail sales grew 2% year on year in June, the NBS said, less than market projections of 3.3% or more and below the annual peak of 12.7%.
With domestic consumers tightening their belts, China’s factories are looking outward, whether that means selling Trump merchandise or the latest clothing brands.
Exports grew 8.6% in annual terms thanks to greater global demand for goods, according to data from the DNE.
Meanwhile, the manufacturing industry in the first half of 2024 grew at the fastest pace in two years, according to the Caixin Purchasing Managers Index.
While Chinese companies hope to make a quick buck from Trump’s brush with death, their results are likely to be affected if the former president is re-elected in November.
During his first term, from 2017 to 2021, Trump embarked on a trade war with China in response to what he said were years of unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft.
Many of Trump’s trade policies toward China have been continued or expanded under U.S. President Joe Biden amid growing bipartisan distrust in Beijing.
While Biden and Trump proposed new tariffs during the campaign, the Republican candidate went much further, suggesting tariffs of 60% or more on all Chinese imports.
A 60% tariff on Chinese goods would drastically reduce imports, halving China’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, according to UBS research.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
