Chinese e-commerce platforms such as Temu are selling clothing printed with an image of Trump with a bloody, raised fist.
Taipei, Taiwan – As the United States struggles to come to terms with Saturday’s attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, factories on the other side of the world in China are already busily churning out commemorative T-shirts.
Hours after the shooting at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally, Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao was selling T-shirts featuring an Associated Press photo of a bleeding Trump with his fist raised being led away by Secret Service agents.
T-shirts with images and slogans like “Fight! Fight! Fight!” and “Shooting makes me stronger!” were sold for as low as $4 each.
Retailers told Chinese media they were surprised at how quickly the T-shirts sold out.
“As soon as we saw the news about the shooting, we put the T-shirts on Taobao without even printing them, and within three hours we had more than 2,000 orders from China and the US,” Li Jinwei, a Taobao seller, told the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Taobao’s parent company Alibaba.
By Monday, censors in Beijing had removed the T-shirts from internet search results across China.
These products may be restricted within China, but Chinese manufacturers are still hoping to cash in on cultural trends abroad – a skill they have become adept at with the rise of sites such as Temu and fast-fashion retailer Shein.
Temu and Shein work with thousands of suppliers and manufacturers to produce cheap clothing and other goods in small quantities and quickly to cater to the whims of overseas consumers.
Temu, an e-commerce platform popular outside China for selling home goods and electronics at ultra-low prices, still offers dozens of versions of Trump T-shirts for sale starting at $8.49 each, many with U.S.-focused slogans such as “Make America Great Again.”
“This is a vivid story of how China’s supply chains are evolving under the ‘internet celebrity economy’ – a business model aimed at leveraging online traffic,” Yue Xu, chief China economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, told Al Jazeera.
“To enable retailers and manufacturers to capitalize on temporary consumer enthusiasm, supply chains need to be prepared to respond quickly to breaking news stories and other impactful societal events.”
Su said responding to cultural events and trends has become a matter of survival for many manufacturers facing China’s economic slowdown.
Data released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics on Monday showed China’s economy is expected to grow just 4.7% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2024, better than its performance during the COVID-19 pandemic but far slower than in past decades.
China’s real estate sector, once one of the engines of economic growth, has undergone a long and painful contraction, and consumption has not been able to make up the difference as consumers preserve their savings.
Retail sales rose 2 percent in June from a year earlier, according to the Office for National Statistics, below market expectations of more than 3.3 percent and down from a yearly high of 12.7 percent.
As domestic consumers try to save money, Chinese factories are turning overseas, selling Trump merchandise and the latest designer items.
Exports grew 8.6 percent year-on-year due to rising global demand for goods, NBS data showed.
Meanwhile, manufacturing grew at the fastest pace in the past two years in the first half of 2024, according to the Caixin Purchasing Managers’ Index.
Chinese companies are hoping to make a quick buck from Trump’s brush with death, but profits are likely to take a hit if he is re-elected in November.
During his first term, which ran from 2017 to 2021, President Trump embarked on a trade war with China to combat years of unfair trade practices and theft of intellectual property.
Many of Trump’s trade policies toward China have been continued or expanded under U.S. President Joe Biden amid growing bipartisan distrust of Beijing.
Both Biden and Trump proposed new tariffs during the campaigns, but the Republican candidate has gone further, proposing tariffs of more than 60% on all imports from China.
A 60% tariff on Chinese goods would dramatically reduce imports and halve China’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, according to a UBS study.
