A defiant China looks beyond Trump’s America

By Faith Barbara N Ruhinda updated at 1712 EAT on Thursday 1 May 2025

We don’t care about sales to the United States,” says Hu Tianqiang as one of his toy fighter jets flies past our heads.

It’s hard to hear him above the buzzing toy planes and miniature drones, an almost rhythmic backdrop to the cacophony of toys that surround him, all clamouring for the attention of buyers.

Hu’s stall, Zhongxiang Toys, sits inside the world’s biggest wholesale market in the small Chinese city of Yiwu.

It’s a huge showroom of more than 75,000 shops where buyers come seeking just about everything, from twinkling Christmas lights and kitchenware to umbrellas and massage guns.

It can take most of the day just to get around one department given each of them has an airport hangar’s worth of goods on show

Yiwu is in the province of Zhejiang, along China’s eastern coast. The manufacturing and export hub, home to more than 30 ports, accounted for 17% of all Chinese sales to the US last year.

Mr Hu, too, is on the frontline. He sits among rows of snazzy toy jets, squeaking dogs, fluffy stuffed animals, barbies and motorcycle-riding spidermen – a sliver of the $34bn (£25bn) worth of toys China exported in 2024.

About $10bn of it went to the US. But now, these Chinese exports to America face up to 245% tariffs. And US President Donald Trump has made it clear that he blames Beijing in particular for cornering too much of the global market.

But things have changed here since Trump’s first trade war against China, which kicked off in 2018. It taught Yiwu a lesson, summed up by Mr Hu: “Other countries have money too!”

That defiance has become a familiar theme in the world’s second-biggest economy, which is bracing itself for another turbulent Trump presidency.

Beijing, which has been repeatedly telling the world that the US was bullying countries into trade negotiations, has not backed down yet from the trade war.

The propaganda online has ratcheted up, applauding Chinese innovation and diplomacy in contrast to the uncertainty unleashed by Trump.

On the country’s highly controlled social media, there are plenty of posts echoing the leadership’s promise that China will keep fighting.

And in factories and markets, businessmen and exporters now say they have other alternatives, beyond Trump’s America. Mr Hu, for instance, says around 20%-30% of his business came from US buyers. But not anymore.

We don’t care about that 20-30%,” Mr Hu says. “We now sell mostly to South America and the Middle East. We are not lacking money, we are rich.”

When we ask about Trump, his colleague Chen Lang jumps in, rolling his eyes: “He’s cracking international jokes like no other. One day, one joke. Adding tariffs for him is like cracking a joke.”

Nearby, one of the thousands of buyers that flock to this market every day is negotiating a price to buy more than 100 robots that turn into cars in a series of beeps and buzzes. After tapping various numbers into a calculator, the final price is written in chalk on the floor.

Trump accused China of operating the Panama canal, which is run by a Hong Kong based firm, and vowed to take it back.

He has been on the hunt for ways to mine rare earth minerals which China effectively has a monopoly over making this a key part of any deal with Ukraine. His threats to take Greenland are also likely aimed at curbing China’s ambitions in the Arctic.

And of course, he initiated another trade war which takes special aim at China’s neighbours such as Vietnam and Cambodia that have been crucial to its evolving supply chain.

In the last week, he suggested the levies on Chinese goods could be halved and spoke of a fair deal with China that his administration was actively negotiating.

But China’s Commerce Ministry rebuffed this as groundless with no factual basis. The headlines in state media haven’t spared him either: Trump is probably the worst president in American history, read one on state TV.

It seems the US president is waiting for his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to pick up the phone.

The US still relies heavily on Chinese manufacturing to meet its own domestic demand think phones, computers, semiconductors, furniture, clothes and, of course, toys. Electronics and machinery alone account for more than 50% of US imports.

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