YIWU, China — Hammers, hats and hair clips. Toys, tech, socks, baseball caps and Christmas decorations. If it’s a cheap manufactured product, it may well have come from the world’s largest wholesale market in the Chinese city of Yiwu.
With 75,000 suppliers spread across six buildings, it was once a one-stop shop for American companies, big and small, looking to buy cheap goods and export them back to the U.S.
Today it is on the front line of President Donald Trump’s trade war, and after he upped U.S. tariffs on Chinese-made goods from 10% to 145%, vendors told NBC News on Wednesday, their once reliable American clients have started to put orders on hold or cancel them altogether.
Nicole Zhang and her husband, Huang Fangchao, whose Yiwu Dowell Accessories Co. makes hair accessories for major brands using machine-cut and hand-finished materials, said around 60 or 70% of her 6 million pieces were destined for the U.S.
But as tariffs have soared, she said American clients like Target have halted orders and put two shipping containers full of her products on hold. “They want to see what is happening in the future,” she said.
After stunning trading partners and global markets in early April, when he announced a raft of “reciprocal” tariffs on imports from more than 180 countries, Trump subsequently paused higher targeted tariffs for 90 days for most countries.
But he did not include China, which was hit hardest of all and has since imposed retaliatory tariffs of up to 125% on U.S. imports.
In Yiwu, the effects have started to take their toll.
Chen Jinsai, a vendor selling press-on nails, said she didn’t think she’d shipped anything to the U.S. “in the first half of this year” mainly “because the export taxes have gotten way too high.”
Goods that were ready to be shipped have “just been sitting there,” she said, adding that customers had not asked them to suck up the extra costs from the tariffs. “If I had to pay the tax, I’d be losing money. Our prices are already quite low, so the tax is definitely something the customer has to handle themselves,” she said.
It’s a reversal from last year when the provincial, development and reform commission in the district of Zhejiang, where Yiwu is based, reported that the city’s total import and export value reached 668.93 billion yuan ($91 billion), an increase of 18.2% from the previous year. With U.S. trade uncertain, some of the traders in Yiwu said they were already focusing on markets in other parts of the world, such as the Middle East and Asia.
Sock vendor Lou Jinling, meanwhile, said only around 10% of her business was in the U.S., “so we’re not heavily affected.”
“Since tariffs, some clients asked me to help share the cost, but I won’t do that because the margin is already very thin,” she said, adding that one of her American customers “told me he managed to clear out his warehouse stock as people were panic-buying from him.”
“For us, we have ways of offsetting the losses by selling to other markets,” she said. “But I feel sorry for everyday Americans, as they are the ones paying for the rising cost.”
One of the people who might have to pay more to import into the U.S. is Vicky Eng, who said she’d noticed her clients back home in the U.S. had become “a lot more hesitant” since the tariffs were introduced. Eng, who flew in from Chicago with her sister Vivian Eng, 29, to source hair clips and other accessories for their company, Adorro, said they sold them on to American retailers, mostly in the Midwest and Florida.
“We haven’t raised prices since the tariffs have been announced because we don’t want to pre-emptively jump the gun with any price increases if it’s not necessary,” Eng, 30, said.
Nonetheless, their clients, she said, were “placing much smaller volume orders.”
Most of their customers were “relatively small businesses,” Eng said, adding that since the tariffs were introduced, it had become “a little harder” for people to operate.
The Chinese vendors were “just like us.” she added. “They can’t have an empty store.”
