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Opinion|Long Live Comrade Trump’s Tariffs
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/opinion/trump-tariffs-china-ecommerce.html
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Guest Essay
April 16, 2025, 1:02 a.m. ET
By Moira Weigel
Dr. Weigel, an assistant professor at Harvard University, is researching a book on e-commerce platforms.
In China, one of many nicknames for President Trump is Chuan Jianguo. It literally translates as “Trump the Nation Builder.” My best translation is “Comrade Trump.” The joke is that Mr. Trump is a patriotic son of China who is diligently advancing Chinese interests by causing chaos in the United States.
I learned about these memes from friends I made last summer while training as a merchant in Amazon’s official recruitment center in Hangzhou and as a Temu seller in Shenzhen. The companies are part of an enormous e-commerce ecosystem that has become central to global retailing and to the global economy. This ecosystem is deeply rooted in China and includes manufacturers of goods, sellers of goods online, and those who peddle software and services to both groups. Amazon, the millennial-cute Etsy, the bargain shopping app Temu, the fast-fashion retailer Shein and even Google and Meta — all are dependent on millions of China-based sellers.
In 2023, Temu, purveyor of a huge range of goods, from mittens to mobile homes, became the single largest buyer of ads on Meta, The Wall Street Journal reported last year, where its parent company, PDD Holdings, is one of the largest buyers of ads on Google. (Temu disputes the amount spent.) Analysts estimated that Shein spent $200 million on Facebook and Instagram ads in just the third quarter of that year.
It would not be such a stretch to say that Amazon is as much a Chinese company as an American one: More than half of its top sellers are in China, and the fees these third-party sellers pay to use Amazon’s marketplace are one of its largest sources of revenue.
This dynamic explains why the stiff China tariffs imposed by Mr. Trump are unlikely to achieve his goal of returning manufacturing jobs to the United States. Instead, the tariffs will force Americans to pay more for the same prosaic goods they’ve always gotten from Amazon. They will also push the Chinese Amazon ecosystem to broaden its horizons and, in doing so, strengthen China’s economic power throughout the world.
