Taipei, Taiwan – As the United States struggled to come to terms with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday, factories halfway around the world in China were already hard at work churning 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 bearing an Associated Press photo of a bleeding Trump clenching his fists as he was escorted from the venue by Secret Service agents.
Some T-shirts, which featured slogans like “Fight! Fight! Fight!” and “Shooting makes me stronger!”, sold for as little as $4 each.
Retailers told Chinese media they were surprised by how quickly the shirts sold out.
“We put the shirts on Taobao as soon as we saw the news about the shooting, even 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 seller Li Jinwei told the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Taobao's parent company Alibaba.
On Monday, Beijing's censorship apparatus removed the T-shirts from Internet search results in China.
While items may be restricted in China, Chinese manufacturers are still hoping to capitalize 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 short runs of cheap clothing and other items to meet the whims of foreign consumers.
On Temu, an e-commerce platform popular outside China for its ultra-low prices on household goods and electronics, dozens of versions of Trump T-shirts are still selling for $8.49 each, many with US-centric slogans like “Make America Great Again.”
“It's a vivid story that shows how China's supply chain is evolving under the 'Internet celebrity economy', a business model aimed at capitalising on online traffic,” Yue Su, senior economist for China at the Economist Intelligence Unit, told Al Jazeera.
“The supply chain needs to be prepared to respond quickly to breaking news or other highly influential social events, so that retailers or manufacturers can take advantage of temporary consumer enthusiasm.”
Responding to cultural trends and moments 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 percent annually in the second quarter of 2024, according to data released Monday by the National Bureau of Statistics, better than its performance in the COVID-19 pandemic era but much slower than in past decades.
China's property sector, once one of the engines of economic growth, is in the midst of a long and painful downturn, while consumption is failing to make up the difference as consumers hold on to their savings.
Retail sales rose 2 percent year-on-year in June, the NBS said, less than market projections of 3.3 percent or more and below an annual peak of 12.7 percent.
As Chinese consumers tighten their belts, Chinese factories are setting their sights abroad, whether selling Trump products or the latest clothing brands.
Exports grew 8.6 percent year-on-year thanks to higher global demand for goods, according to NBS data.
Meanwhile, the manufacturing sector in the first half of 2024 grew at its fastest pace in two years, according to the Caixin Purchasing Managers Index.
While Chinese companies are hoping to make a quick buck as Trump's death approaches, their bottom lines will likely suffer 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 were continued or expanded under 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 more on all Chinese imports.
A 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods would dramatically reduce imports, halving China's annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, according to UBS research.
