By Yoko Kubota – Photographs and video by Andrea Verdelli for WSJ
YIWU, China—At the world’s biggest wholesale market in this eastern Chinese exporting hub, American clients have disappeared.
The Americans, or their representatives, used to show up to buy everything from Paw Patrol plushy dolls to Panama hats to toy sniper rifles. The famous Yiwu market here has 75,000 vendors across an area bigger than 1,000 American football fields; no other place sells so much stuff, so cheaply, and for decades, much of it went to the voracious U.S. consumer.
But with President Trump’s latest tariffs on China, which surged to 145% last week, very little of the merchandise makes economic sense for American buyers now.
Yet during a visit by a Wall Street Journal reporter, vendors said they were confident they would survive, sustained by sales to other buyers, and a bit perplexed. Where would the Americans get all their sparkly keychains, baseball caps and coffee thermoses now?
For some everyday items, such as socks, they said it might not be easy.
“They could get things from other countries, but I don’t know if the other countries can produce them as well as China,” said Zhou Li of socks maker Shen Li, referring to the U.S. “China’s ability to make stuff is just seriously incredible.”
Sock sellers in China say they can’t lower their prices much more to keep selling into the U.S.
Foreign buyers negotiated at a shop at the Yiwu market on Friday.
At Yiwu, which has five enormous districts, each with multistory buildings, part of District Four’s first floor is dedicated to socks. Most are made in a nearby city called Zhuji, which Chinese state media has called “the sock capital” of the world. One subdistrict of Zhuji produces some 25 billion pairs of socks a year, or about a third of global socks production, state media Xinhua said.
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