Taipei, Taiwan – As the United States was struggling to come to terms with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday, factories halfway across the world in China were already hard at work pumping out commemorative T-shirts.
Within hours of the shooting at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao was selling T-shirts emblazoned with an Associated Press photo of a bleeding, fist-pumping Trump being escorted away by Secret Service agents.
Featuring slogans like “Fight! Fight! Fight!” and “Shooting Makes Me Stronger!” under the image, some T-shirts retailed for as low as $4 apiece.
Retailers told Chinese media outlets that they were surprised at how quickly the T-shirts were snapped up.
“We put the T-shirts on Taobao as soon as we saw the news about the shooting, though we hadn’t even printed them, and within three hours we saw more than 2,000 orders from both China and the US,” Taobao vendor Li Jinwei told the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Taobao’s parent company Alibaba.
By Monday, Beijing’s censorship apparatus had scrubbed the T-shirts from internet search results in China.
While the items may be restricted in China, Chinese manufacturers are still hoping to cash in on the cultural moment overseas – 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 short runs of cheap clothing and other items to respond to the whims of foreign consumers.
On Temu, an e-commerce platform that is popular outside China due to its ultra-low prices for household goods and electronics, dozens of versions of the Trump T-shirts are still being sold from $8.49 each, in many cases featuring US-focused slogans like “Make America Great Again”.
“It is a vivid story which shows how China’s supply chain evolves under the ‘internet celebrity economy,’ a business model aimed at capitalising on online traffic,” Yue Su, principal China economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit, told Al Jazeera.
“It needs supply chain readiness to quickly respond to breaking news or other highly influential social events so that retailers or manufacturers could capitalise on the temporary consumption enthusiasm.”
Responding to cultural moments and trends has in fact 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 percent on year in the second quarter of 2024, according to data released on Monday by the National Bureau of Statistics, better than its COVID-19 pandemic-era performance but much slower than in decades past.
China’s property sector, once one of the engines of the country’s economic growth, is undergoing a long and painful contraction, while consumption is failing to make up the difference as consumers hold on to their savings.
Retail sales grew 2 percent year on year in June, the NBS said, less than market projections of 3.3 percent or more and down from a yearly peak of 12.7 percent.
With domestic consumers tightening their belts, China’s factories are setting their sights overseas, whether that means hawking Trump merchandise or the latest brand wear.
Exports grew 8.6 percent year-on-year thanks to a higher global demand for goods, according to NBS data.
Meanwhile, manufacturing in the first half of 2024 grew at its fastest rate in two years, according to the Caixin Purchasing Managers Index.
While Chinese businesses are hoping to make a quick buck from Trump’s close brush with death, their bottom line is likely to take a hit if the former president is re-elected in November.
During his first term in office from 2017 to 2021, Trump embarked on a trade war with China in response to what he said was years of unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft.
Many of Trump’s trade policies towards China were continued or expanded under US President Joe Biden amid growing bipartisan distrust of Beijing.
While both Biden and Trump have proposed new tariffs on the campaign trail, the Republican candidate has gone much further, suggesting tariffs of 60 percent or higher on all Chinese imports.
A 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods would dramatically reduce imports, halving China’s annual rate of gross domestic product (GDP) growth, according to research by UBS.
