YIWU, China – Deep inside a 10-block factory outlet in China, the folks who supply Americans with their plastic dinosaurs and “Kiss My Bass” baseball caps are confident that Donald Trump will win on November 3rd.
President Trump’s campaign paraphernalia – hats, banners, mugs, and virtually anything else that can carry a logo – were selling briskly in stores in the vast wholesale market in the Chinese city of Yiwu. In contrast, on recent visits by shopkeepers, there were almost no bulk orders for materials in support of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“We had four or five buyers for Trump materials every month,” said Ge Lu, a seller in one of around 100 stores that specialize only in flags, referring to large buyers buying banners by the thousands. “We had a Biden buyer this year.”
The place is not for the average shopper. Yiwu is home to the world’s largest wholesale market where global retailers look for items to store on their own shelves. Shoppers for businesses big and small look for stalls selling hats, T-shirts, banners, face masks, baby toys, backpacks, modeling clay, and virtually any other manufactured product that will delight the world’s volatile consumers.
It is also home to what Chinese observers of American politics – a nervous group these days amid poor relations between the two countries and Beijing’s closer talks – call the Yiwu Index. The theory is that high demand for a presidential candidate’s goods will lead to a large turnout in November.
According to the informal and highly unscientific index, Mr. Trump currently leads Mr. Biden significantly.
“Trump still has a better chance,” said Zhang Zhijiang, the owner of a cap and hat factory in Jiangsu Province that has a sales office in the Yiwu market.
However, followers of the Yiwu Index believe it is reliable and they have history on their side. In 2016, the index consistently predicted a Trump victory. In the last few weeks of the campaign, demand for Hillary Clinton hats and other souvenirs weakened significantly.
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“They even started, but then they stopped selling, and later Trump sold more,” said Dai Fuli, the owner of a baseball cap factory in Qingdao City with a branch in Yiwu.
China is watching the elections nervously. Mr Trump launched a trade war against Beijing and has been more confrontational on issues like high-tech export controls, industrial espionage, Taiwan and the South China Sea.
At the same time, some in China expect little improvement under a Biden government. They fear that Mr. Biden could even intensify criticism of China’s human rights record while strengthening American alliances with China’s neighbors and with Europe to limit China’s rise.
Official concern has resulted in light coverage of the elections. Chinese state media have reported the great role of money and unsuccessfully urged that Chinese politics not become a political issue. On Chinese social media, Mr. Trump’s frequent interruptions during debates with Mr. Biden caught widespread attention.
Given political sensitivity, the government-controlled market has banned large-scale ads of campaign items for fear of looking biased. Many traders declined to speak during recent visits.
Officially known as the Yiwu International Trade City, it is 12 times the floor space of the Empire State Building, making it look like a small town. Much of the complex was built hastily and even sloppily two decades ago, giving the prematurely aging buildings a dilapidated look.
It has 70,000 stores and transactions that take place under its many rooftops exceeding $ 60 billion a year. The national government regards the market as a sufficient indicator of light industry health to maintain its own Yiwu index of average prices in stores.
Updated
Oct. 29, 2020, 3:46 am ET
With a few disordered exceptions, the floors are classified by product type. The warlike corridors of one floor were dedicated to hats. A second housed flags. A third floor contained costumes and masks, while another was dedicated to toys.
Ms. Dai, the owner of the Qingdao baseball cap factory, rents a booth on the hat floor. She said orders for Trump baseball caps have been consistently high for two years. Biden-cap jobs were negligible until he was named an expected Democratic candidate last spring, but it was only in the past few weeks that these clients have wanted to spend cash, she added. Recent orders came too late to make and ship the hats before the election.
The total for Trump Cap orders this year: “There are tens of thousands this year,” said Ms. Dai. “Biden has a few thousand.”
Despite its accuracy in 2016, the Yiwu Political Index has its shortcomings. Often times, the buyers are not the campaigns themselves, but agents, such as corporations and other institutions who want to show their support for a candidate, or simply stores that want to sell popular goods.
The pandemic has affected normal marketing. China has banned virtually all international visitors since the end of March and imposed strict two-week quarantines on those entering. This has reduced overall activity compared to the 2016 presidential campaign, traders said.
The pandemic has also spawned different types of campaigns. Mr Trump has emphasized large gatherings with supporters waving pennants and carrying various campaign items, increasing demand for goods from Yiwu. Mr Biden has avoided holding or sponsoring mass gatherings in person and has relied more on online events.
As in 2016, Mr Trump also appears to be getting a significant portion of his support from people in rural areas where people may have more space for garden signs and banners. Mr Biden has done better in cities where apartment dwellers have less space to wave flags.
Some vendors believe that Mr. Biden’s supporters are simply doing business elsewhere. Mr. Zhang, the hat factory owner in Jiangsu Province, said Biden supporters appear to be placing more orders for baseball caps in Vietnam and Myanmar.
As trade with the United States became increasingly questionable, some Yiwu vendors said they were less interested in the American market. In the flag department, some seemed instead to address China’s growing nationalism. On the flag floor, the corridors were a scarlet sea of red national flags, red pennants of the Chinese Communist Party, and other souvenirs.
Even so, Trump paraphernalia are still in demand. In a Halloween mask factory, rubbery Trump masks were consistently popular and completely sold out.
The factory created a Biden mask, said Gigi Zhang, the store manager, but no one had ordered it yet.
Coral Yang and Liu Yi contributed to the research.
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