HONG KONG — Mere minutes after Donald Trump was whisked away from his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, following an assassination attempt Saturday, printing machines on the other side of the world were already churning out T-shirts bearing the image of the former president with his ear bloodied and his fist held high.
It was Sunday morning in China, where retailers had listed merchandise showing the now-famous image on the Alibaba-owned Taobao, one of China’s most popular e-commerce websites. Released by The Associated Press, the image shows Trump surrounded by Secret Service agents.
One listing reviewed by NBC News just hours after the shooting showed a T-shirt being sold for around $6. The seller had listed the item as “Trump T-shirt, Trump peripheral products, Trump in prison mugshot, cotton short sleeve, never give in, loose, fashion.” At least 72 people had already purchased it.
“They are very efficient,” Jinmin Wang, professor of strategy and international business at the Nottingham University Business School in the United Kingdom, said of Chinese retailers. “They can download the image and start production within one or two hours since they have the facilities ready,” he said in an interview.
A 25-year-old Taobao seller said she had her T-shirt listings ready by breakfast-time in China. “We put the T-shirts on Taobao as soon as we saw the news about the shooting, though we hadn’t even printed them,” Li Jinwei told the South China Morning Post on Monday. “Within three hours, we saw more than 2,000 orders from both China and the U.S.”
By Tuesday, almost all of the listings had been removed and while it’s unclear why they were taken down, business school professor Wang said the shooting was “politically sensitive” and may have prompted action by Chinese authorities who routinely censor content online. NBC News has approached the Cyberspace Administration of China, but the Chinese internet regulator was not immediately available for comment.
“This event is politically sensitive,” Wang said. “The Sino-U.S. relationship is still sensitive at the moment because there are still disputes between the two governments.”
Alibaba did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment, but other Trump memorabilia was still available, including red hats bearing the slogan “Make America Great Again.” As in the West, Trump holds appeal on Chinese social media sites, where he is often subject to online memes and jokes and goes by the nicknames of “Uncle Trump,” or “Old Man Trump.”
“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.
Saturday’s shooting immediately became a trending subject on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media platform similar to X, with tens of millions of people viewing or commenting on it.
Tensions between the U.S. and China have peaked several times since Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory. Even under the Biden administration, the two countries are still locked in the trade war that began in 2018, when the deficit hit a record high of $418 billion.
Washington’s introduction of tariffs on Chinese goods aimed at closing a vast trade deficit and stopping what it saw as intellectual property theft was one of the defining policies of the Trump administration.
The former president’s referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” and his executive order that ended Hong Kong’s preferential economic treatment and sanctioned Chinese officials for undermining civil liberties there further soured relations between the world’s two largest economies.
Chinese people, especially entrepreneurs, “are keeping an eye on the American presidential campaign because it will also affect the Chinese economy,” Wang said.
Even though the apparel depicting the assassination attempt was no longer available on Chinese platforms, those sites’ American counterparts such as Amazon and Etsy had caught up and were selling similar hoodies and T-shirts in a variety of colors and captions as of Tuesday.
One of them bore the message “Bullet Proof 2024” and another read “Never Surrender.”
