Chinese e-commerce platforms like Temu are selling apparel featuring image of a bleeding, fist-pumping Trump. Taipei, Taiwan – As the United States was struggling to come to terms with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday, factories halfway across the world in China were already hard at work pumping out commemorative T-shirts. Within hours of the shooting at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao was selling T-shirts emblazoned with an Associated Press photo of a bleeding, fist-pumping Trump being escorted away by Secret Service agents.
Keep reading Featuring slogans like “Fight! Fight! Fight!” and “Shooting Makes Me Stronger!” under the image, some T-shirts retailed for as low as $4 apiece. Retailers told Chinese media outlets that they were surprised at how quickly the T-shirts were snapped up. “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,” Taobao vendor Li Jinwei told the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Taobao’s parent company Alibaba.
By Monday, Beijing’s censorship apparatus had scrubbed the T-shirts from internet search results in China. While the items may be restricted in China, Chinese manufacturers are still hoping to cash in on the cultural moment overseas – a skill they have become adept at with the rise of site.