Soon after former president Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania, Chinese consumers went wild for T-shirts bearing the now-iconic photo of a bloodied Trump rising up from the stage and raising his fist beneath an American flag.
On Tuesday, Chinese censors apparently moved to block sales of the T-shirts and yank them from major e-commerce platforms.
Chinese state media on Sunday bemusedly acknowledged the surprising popularity of the Trump shirts among Chinese buyers. Online retailers began cranking out the shirts with amazing speed, adding slogans to the image such as “Shooting Makes Me Stronger,” Trump’s campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again,” or “Fight! Fight! Fight!” – the first words spoken to the crowd by Trump after he survived the assassin’s bullet.
According to Radio Free Asia (RFA) on Tuesday, factories in China’s manufacturing hub of Guangdong began printing T-shirts within hours of the shooting. Clothing merchants said they were surprised by demand for the Trump merchandise. The first products were on sale by the time current President Joe Biden gave an address roughly two hours after the attack in Pennsylvania.
“We put the T-shirts on Taobao as soon as we saw the news about the shooting, though we hadn’t even printed them, and within three hours we saw more than 2,000 orders from both China and the U.S.,” said one online vendor. Taobao is an online shopping platform owned by the gigantic Alibaba corporation.
By Monday, the Chinese Communist Party evidently decided it was time to shut down the Trump boom. Searches for “Trump T-shirt” suddenly stopped producing any results and even older Trump merchandise that had nothing to do with the shooting became hard to find. By Tuesday, it was almost impossible for Chinese consumers to buy the shirts, although they can still be found on the Chinese-language page for eBay.
The photographer who snapped the iconic image of Trump, Evan Vucci, works for the Associated Press (AP). AP journalists on Monday went shopping for T-shirts in China and found it was still possible to order them using “hidden links” or searching “Trump Jianguo,” a Chinese nickname for Trump. “Jianguo” means “build a country,” which sounds nice, but the name was actually slapped on Trump during his presidency as an insult, to mock him for inadvertently helping China with policies that were intended to harm its economy.
Some pages that said the shirts were no longer available were able to process an order if the supposedly dead link was clicked and customer services representatives were reluctantly willing to help customers place orders for the abruptly contraband items.
The Chinese Communist government offered no explanation for why the shirts were banned. Nottingham University Business School professor Jinmin Wang told NBC News on Tuesday the shirts might have been deemed “politically sensitive” because “there are still disputes between the two governments.”
Other observers suggested Chinese officials and/or retailers might have grown nervous the shirts could violate copyright laws by using the iconic photo.
Wang said the Chinese public’s appetite for the Trump shirts was genuine, because they know the American election could affect China’s future too, and because they are fascinated by events in the United States.
“Chinese people are very interested in political, economic and social events in the United States. Some people in China also have that American dream,” Wang said.