A number of Chinese cross-border exporters expect the Trump administration’s erratic trade policy to continue testing their stamina and resilience, days after the tariff truce between Beijing and Washington was extended for another 90 days.
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Those concerns were raised on the sidelines at Friday’s opening of the semi-annual China Cross-Border E-Commerce Trade Fair in Guangzhou, capital of southern Guangdong province, which concludes on Sunday.
With booths at the fair, major online retail platforms – including Shein, PDD Holdings-owned Temu, ByteDance-run TikTok Shop and American e-commerce giant Amazon.com – sought to woo more exporters to open online shops on their sites, which target the US and other overseas markets.
Amazon.com trainer Sandy Zhu, for example, suggested that newcomers to the platform, which caters to 20 overseas markets, sell to the US because traffic was big and doing business there had a “lower threshold” for merchants to navigate.
Still, Guangdong Mingjian Electronics Technology, whose portable coffee machines are sold on Amazon.com, was still “worried about policy uncertainties” in spite of the extended tariff truce, said Chen Jianlun, who represented the Chinese firm at the fair.
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Chen pointed out that the company was forced to suspend its US business for nearly two months from April, when bilateral trade relations went sour.