HONG KONG — Just minutes after Donald Trump was led away from a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, following Saturday’s assassination attempt, printing presses halfway around the world were already churning out T-shirts emblazoned with a portrait of the former president, blood coming from his ear and fist raised high.
It was a Sunday morning in China, and Chinese retailers were listing products on Alibaba-owned Taobao, one of the country’s most popular e-commerce sites, with the now-famous photo, published by the Associated Press, of Trump surrounded by Secret Service agents.
One listing seen by NBC News hours after the shooting showed a T-shirt for sale for about $6. The seller described it as “Trump T-Shirt, Trump Paraphernalia, Trump Prison Mug Shot, Cotton Short Sleeve, Never Give In, Relaxed, Fashion.” At least 72 people had already bought it.
“They’re very efficient,” Jingmin Wang, a professor of strategy and international business at the University of Nottingham Business School in the U.K., said of Chinese retailers. “They’re so well-equipped that they can download an image and start production within an hour or two,” he said in an interview.
One Taobao seller, 25, said he had his T-shirts ready to list by breakfast time in China. “As soon as I saw the news about the shooting, I put the T-shirts on Taobao before they were even printed,” Li Jingwei told the South China Morning Post on Monday. “Within three hours, I had more than 2,000 orders from both China and the US.”
By Tuesday, nearly all of the listings had been removed. It was unclear why they were removed, but Wang said the shooting was a “politically sensitive issue” that may have prompted action from Chinese authorities, who routinely censor online content. NBC News reached out to the Cyberspace Administration of China, China’s internet regulator, which did not immediately comment.
“This event is politically sensitive,” Wang said. “U.S.-China relations are still sensitive at this time because the conflict between the two governments is still ongoing.”
Alibaba did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment, but other Trump memorabilia was still for sale, including red hats with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” As in the West, Trump is popular on Chinese social media sites, where he is often the subject of online memes and jokes, and goes by the nicknames “Uncle Trump” and “Uncle Trump.”
“The Chinese people are very interested in political, economic and social events in the United States. Some Chinese people have the American dream,” Wang said.
Saturday’s shooting quickly trended on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media platform similar to X, with tens of millions of people viewing and commenting on it.
Tensions between the United States and China have peaked several times since Trump won the 2016 presidential election. Even under the Biden administration, the two countries are still mired in a trade war that began in 2018, with the trade deficit hitting a record high of $418 billion.
Tariffs on Chinese products, aimed at closing a huge trade deficit and thwarting perceived intellectual property theft, were one of the signature policies of the Trump administration.
The former president’s calling of the new coronavirus the “Chinese virus” and executive orders ending preferential economic treatment for Hong Kong and imposing sanctions on Chinese authorities for violating Hong Kong’s civil liberties further strained relations between the world’s two largest economies.
“Chinese people, especially entrepreneurs, are paying close attention to the U.S. presidential election as it will also affect China’s economy,” Wang said.
Apparel depicting the assassination attempt is no longer for sale on Chinese platforms, but U.S. competitors including Amazon and Etsy have caught up, and as of Tuesday were selling similar hoodies and T-shirts in a variety of colors and captions.
One of them had the message “Bullet Proof 2024” written on it, while the other read “Never Surrender.”
