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YIWU, China – Deep within a 10-block long strip mall in China, people supplying Americans with their plastic dinosaurs and “Kiss My Bass” baseball caps are confident of Donald Trump’s victory on April 3. November.
President Trump’s campaign paraphernalia – hats, banners, mugs, and just about anything else that might carry a logo – has been selling fast in stores in the vast wholesale market in the Chinese city of Yiwu. In contrast, store owners said during recent visits, bulk orders for support materials to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. have been almost non-existent.
“We’ve had four or five buyers of Trump materials every month,” said Ge Lu, a salesperson for one of the 100 stores that specialize only in flags, referring to large buyers who buy posters by the thousands. “We have had a buyer from Biden this year.”
The place is not for the average buyer. Yiwu is home to the world’s largest wholesale market, where global retailers are looking for items to store on their own shelves. In building after cavernous building, shoppers from businesses large and small choose stalls featuring hats, T-shirts, banners, face masks, baby toys, backpacks, play dough, and virtually any other manufactured product that will delight the world’s fickle consumers.
It’s also home to what Chinese observers of American politics, a nervous bunch these days, given the bitter relations between the two countries and Beijing’s tighter limits on conversation, call the Yiwu Index. High demand for merchandise from a presidential candidate, the theory goes, translates into large voter turnout in November.
Right now, according to the informal and unscientific index, Trump is substantially leading Biden.
“Trump still has a better chance,” said Zhang Zhijiang, owner of a cap and hat factory in Jiangsu province that has a sales office in Yiwu market.
However, followers of the Yiwu Index believe it to be reliable and have history on their side. In 2016, the index consistently predicted a Trump victory. In the final weeks of the campaign, demand for Hillary Clinton hats and other memorabilia weakened considerably.
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“They even started, but then they stopped selling, and then Trump sold more,” said Dai Fuli, who owns a baseball cap factory in Qingdao City that has a store in Yiwu.
China is watching the elections nervously. Trump launched a trade war against Beijing and has taken a more confrontational approach on issues such as high-tech export controls, industrial espionage, Taiwan and the South China Sea.
At the same time, some in China expect little improvement under the Biden administration. They worry that Biden may even intensify criticism of China’s human rights record while strengthening US alliances with China’s neighbors and with Europe to limit China’s rise.
Official anxiety has led to light coverage of the election. Chinese state media have reported the great role money plays and unsuccessfully urged that China’s policy not become a political issue. On Chinese social media, Trump’s frequent interruptions during debates with Biden attracted widespread attention.
Given political sensitivities, the government-controlled market has banned large displays of campaign merchandise for fear of appearing partisan. Many merchants declined to speak during recent visits.
Formally named the Yiwu International Trade City, it is 12 times the size of the Empire State Building, making it look like a small city. Much of the complex was hastily and even poorly built two decades ago, giving its prematurely aged buildings a run-down look.
It has 70,000 stores and the transactions that take place under its many roofs exceed 60,000 million dollars a year. The national government considers that the market is an indicator of the health of light manufacturing that manages its own Yiwu Index, of average prices in stores.
With a few messy exceptions, the floors are organized by type of merchandise. The one-story burrow-shaped aisles were dedicated to hats. A second housed flags. A third floor featured costumes and masks, while another was dedicated to toys.
Ms. Dai, owner of the baseball cap factory in Qingdao, rents a booth on the hat floor. He said orders for Trump’s baseball caps had been consistently strong for two years. Biden’s cap requests were negligible until he became the long-awaited Democratic nominee last spring, but only in recent weeks have these customers wanted to deposit cash, he added. Recent orders came too late to make and deliver the hats before the election.
So Trump’s total cap requests so far this year: “There are tens of thousands this year,” Dai said. “Biden has a few thousand.”
Despite its 2016 accuracy, the Yiwu political index has its flaws. Often, the buyers are not the campaigns themselves, but representatives, such as companies and other institutions that want to express their support for a candidate, or simply stores that want to sell popular merchandise.
The pandemic has interfered with normal marketing. China has banned virtually all international visitors since the end of March, and has required strict two-week quarantines for those entering. This has reduced overall activity compared to the 2016 presidential campaign, traders said.
The pandemic has also produced different styles of campaigns. Trump has emphasized large gatherings, with supporters waving pennants and wearing various campaign products, increasing demand for Yiwu products. Biden has avoided holding or encouraging mass gatherings in person and has relied more on online events.
As in 2016, Trump also appears to be drawing a considerable part of his support from people in rural areas, where people can have more space for posters and banners in the garden. Biden has done better in cities, where apartment dwellers have less room to wave flags.
Some vendors think that Biden’s supporters may simply be doing business elsewhere. Mr. Zhang, owner of the hat factory in Jiangsu province, said Biden supporters appeared to be placing more orders for baseball caps in Vietnam and Myanmar.
With trade with the United States increasingly in doubt, some Yiwu suppliers said they were less and less interested in the US market. In the flags section, some seemed to appeal instead to China’s growing nationalism. On the flag floor, the halls were a scarlet sea of red national flags, red Chinese Communist Party pennants, and other memorabilia.
However, Trump paraphernalia is still in demand. At a Halloween mask factory store, Trump’s rubber masks were consistently popular and sold out completely.
The factory created a Biden mask, said Gigi Zhang, a store manager, but no one had ordered it yet.
Coral Yang and Liu Yi contributed research.
