The American accent is conspicuously scarce among foreign buyers wandering the aisles of China’s largest wholesale market – a sprawling global bazaar in Yiwu city offering everything from Christmas decorations to power tools.
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Arabic, Russian and Spanish are more commonly heard in negotiations between buyers and sellers. And mirroring a lack of US buyers on the ground in China, Washington’s sweeping tariffs on Chinese goods appear to be having a relatively small impact on traders in the world’s capital for small commodities.
Some of the vendors in Yiwu say the trade war’s sting has been softened by their growing global customer base – the US accounted for less than 15 per cent of Yiwu’s exports in 2024, totalling 83.6 billion yuan (US$11.5 billion), according to Yiwu customs data.
An exporter of Christmas ornaments in Yiwu, surnamed Liu, said she has just one US client, with orders worth around 100,000 yuan (US$13,700). So far, the deal has not been cancelled – just put on hold as the buyer takes a wait-and-see approach.
“If it does get cancelled, I’ll just shift the goods to my South American customers,” she said, shrugging off the potential loss. “It would barely make a dent in my business.”
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Her clients, she added, remained optimistic that tariffs would not stay this high for long, but even if “something that used to cost 1 yuan now sells for 2, people will still buy it”.