[Paywalled Link] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/opinion/trump-tariffs-china-ecommerce.html?smid=tw-share
NYT - Opinion - Guest Essay - By Moira Weigel. 04/18/25
In China, one of many nicknames for President Trump is Chuan Jianguo. It literally translates as “Trump the Nation Builder.” My best translation is “Comrade Trump.” The joke is that Mr. Trump is a patriotic son of China who is diligently advancing Chinese interests by causing chaos in the United States.
I learned about these memes from friends I made last summer while training as a merchant in Amazon’s official recruitment center in Hangzhou and as a Temu seller in Shenzhen. The companies are part of an enormous e-commerce ecosystem that has become central to global retailing and to the global economy. This ecosystem is deeply rooted in China and includes manufacturers of goods, sellers of goods online, and those who peddle software and services to both groups. Amazon, the millennial-cute Etsy, the bargain shopping app Temu, the fast-fashion retailer Shein and even Google and Meta — all are dependent on millions of China-based sellers.
In 2023, Temu, purveyor of a huge range of goods, from mittens to mobile homes, became the single largest buyer of ads on Meta, The Wall Street Journal reported last year, where its parent company, PDD Holdings, is one of the largest buyers of ads on Google. (Temu disputes the amount spent.) Analysts estimated that Shein spent $200 million on Facebook and Instagram ads in just the third quarter of that year.
It would not be such a stretch to say that Amazon is as much a Chinese company as an American one: More than half of its top sellers are in China, and the fees these third-party sellers pay to use Amazon’s marketplace are one of its largest sources of revenue.
This dynamic explains why the stiff China tariffs imposed by Mr. Trump are unlikely to achieve his goal of returning manufacturing jobs to the United States. Instead, the tariffs will force Americans to pay more for the same prosaic goods they’ve always gotten from Amazon. They will also push the Chinese Amazon ecosystem to broaden its horizons and, in doing so, strengthen China’s economic power throughout the world.
There are over 100,000 Amazon sellers in the city of Shenzhen, a bustling metropolis just north of Hong Kong where the Pearl River estuaries empty into the South China Sea. Many smaller companies sell ordinary products (plastic water bottles, rubber hoses, Christmas lights) under obscure, even bizarre, brand names. Other manufacturers are Goliaths. The Chinese electronics manufacturer Anker, founded in Shenzhen to create replacement laptop batteries but quickly realigned to make charging devices for electronics, has about 5,000 employees and $3 billion in annual revenue.
Amazon shoppers’ loyalty is typically not to any one seller, but to Amazon itself. Once they arrive at Amazon’s website, shoppers overwhelmingly prioritize what Amazon shows them first.
Given this, Amazon shoppers may not notice the impact high tariffs will have on smaller sellers, which tend to lack the capital and resources to absorb such instability. Similar to what happened in the summer of 2021, when Amazon abruptly suspended tens of thousands of Chinese stores it suspected of buying fake reviews, the companies that fail will be swiftly replaced and forgotten.
American shoppers are more likely to notice higher prices for their goods. The vast majority of Amazon products, for instance, are made in China. Many American Amazon sellers source their products there. They, like their China-based counterparts, will eventually be forced to raise their prices because they have such low profit margins as it is.
Most economists dismiss the idea that the tariffs will help bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Some question whether America should even attempt to draw them back. The Chinese government has spent decades making massive investments in education, infrastructure and research. And while the cost of Chinese labor has gone up, it is still significantly lower than the cost of American labor. Exemptions announced over the weekend for smartphones, computers and other electronics — promptly followed by cautions that they may well be temporary — have caused more chaos and consternation.
Over the medium to longer term, American tariffs could benefit China. There is evidence that many Chinese sellers avoid tariffs by employing third-party companies that conceal the full value of their goods or their place of origin. Goldman Sachs estimates that such practices helped Chinese businesses evade $110 billion to $130 billion in tariffs from the first Trump administration. Many American sellers who import from China say these sleights of hand put them at a disadvantage. And if the tariffs push the United States into a recession, consumers will be looking to save, a shift Chinese sellers’ global push will also most likely benefit from advances in artificial intelligence that will allow manufacturers to produce and manage more products, translate their advertising into different languages and research new overseas markets more effectively than ever before.
In the past, sudden disruptions to China’s global e-commerce industry have accelerated innovation. In Shenzhen, Amazon’s 2021 mass suspension of accounts still feels like an active trauma. One businessman who told me about it when I visited last summer almost wept. But it was also a key reason that many merchants migrated to Temu as it began pouring money into expanding into the United States. Temu launched in September 2022. By the end of 2024, analysts estimated that Temu had sold over $50 billion of goods, and Apple confirmed that Temu’s app was the year’s most downloaded on iPhones in the United States; according to Similar Web, a data analytics platform, in February 2025, Temu’s U. S. website received almost one billion visits.
Then there’s the Trump administration’s decision to end an exemption that has long allowed e-commerce businesses to ship packages worth less than $800 into the U.S. duty-free. Although the shift will hurt online sellers like Temu that specialize in selling inexpensive goods, the company anticipated the change and had already begun encouraging merchants to send larger shipments to warehouses in the United States, rather than selling directly to customers. That is driving the growth of Chinese third-party logistics companies, often owned or operated in partnership with friends and relatives in the United States.
So perhaps it makes sense that so many Shenzhen merchants seem to admire Mr. Trump as a businessman, if not as a leader. Their affection, as I understand it, is complicated, as their admiration is now tempered with upset at his new tariff regime. Some tell me that the fondness for Mr. Trump is mostly a joke. But many share a sense that, however painful they may be in the short term, the tariffs will eventually spur China to assume its rightful place as the world’s leader and the beacon of a new phase of globalization that’s no longer centered on America.
On Taobao, a Chinese domestic e-commerce platform, you can buy a ceramic statue of Mr. Trump to bring good luck to your business. The original is called Xi Tian Dong Fo Tu Lan Pu: Trump, the all-knowing Buddha of the West, or Western Heaven. Now, there are knockoffs on Amazon for $45 to $50 from storefronts with names like Nagelbag and DFGHJ. With Comrade Trump at your side, or solemnly meditating on your dashboard, the future ahead is bright. to benefit Shenzhen’s many Amazon sellers who specialize in inexpensive goods.
Plus, tariffs create a strong incentive for Chinese sellers to try to sell their goods elsewhere. For the past two years, their government has been calling on businesses to chuhai, or go global, and expand to Africa, Latin America, and Central and Southeast Asia.
Amazon introduced a distinctive kind of globalization that made the Shenzhen ecosystem possible. And as the tariffs drive China to globalize in the rest of the world, this ecosystem, which relies on Amazon’s massive platform and data for its survival, can lead the way. There’s a reason the Chinese government partnered closely with Amazon for the past 10 years.
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