Trump rally shooting: Chinese online retailers quick off mark with souvenir T-shirts

Former president Trump narrowly escaped an assassination attempt at around 6.15pm local time on July 13 in the US state of Pennsylvania. Associated Press released the iconic photo of a fist-waving Trump at 6.31pm, Report informs referring to the South China Morning Post.

Biden’s first public comment on the shooting came at around 8pm, by which time Chinese manufacturers were already primed to churn out T-shirts emblazoned with an image of a defiant Trump.

The first batch went on sale on Taobao, a popular Chinese e-commerce platform, at 8.40pm – before most governments around the world had scrambled together a response.

Li Jinwei, a 25-year-old Taobao seller, had her T-shirts on her online shelves 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, and within three hours we saw more than 2,000 orders from both China and the US,” she said.

Taobao is owned by Alibaba, which also owns the South China Morning Post.

Li’s factory is based in the northern province of Hebei, and to create new products, she simply downloads an image and presses print, with the factory taking an average of one minute to finish a T-shirt. “For this year’s US presidential election, we only made souvenirs of Trump, as he has a higher chance of winning the election, and he is popular among Chinese netizens,” Li said.

Demand for “election- and rally-themed” custom T-shirts is quite strong in the US market, according to Guangdong-based Allen Yao, co-founder of Xinflying Digital Printing Production. Earlier this year, Yao opened a fully automated factory in California, with a daily production capacity of around 3,000 T-shirts, a total that is expected to increase to 8,000 by next month. “The T-shirts are imported from Vietnam and stored in US warehouses, and the production speed is very fast,” Yao said.

A digital printing machine could print 27 square metres (290 sq ft), or about eight election-related T-shirts, in an hour and these could be immediately put on the shelves for sale in California, he added. “Demand is so strong, and we just can’t produce enough.” The company plans to open a new factory on the US east coast next year, increasing daily production capacity to 30,000 items.