Trump administration officials have promoted the tariffs as a way to boost US manufacturing and create more high-paying jobs. But American small business owners painted a very different picture of the situation on TikTok. In one video, the founder of a trendy hair accessories brand rolled her eyes and explained that the company’s products “literally cannot be made here.” In another, the CEO of a shoe company similarly said China “is just the only place I could manufacture.” The owner of a company that makes self-checkout kiosks lamented about how awful his experiences have been working with suppliers in the US compared to those in China. “What it’s about is Americans are a bunch of babies and they are hard to work with,” he told the camera.
The founder of a London-based clothing brand struck a more heartwarming tone, uploading a slideshow of pictures of herself posing with the garment workers her company partners with in China set to The Fray song “Look After You.” The text overlaid on one photo read “Our wins are their wins.” The TikTok post received over 55,000 likes, an indication of how attitudes toward China have evolved among at least some Western consumers compared to the past when the country’s factories were mostly associated with pumping out cheap, flimsy goods. “Suddenly people see, oh, it’s not this imagined ‘slave labor’ that’s making my clothes, they’re actually humans,” says Tianyu Fang, a fellow at the New America think tank and one of the cofounders of the Chinese internet culture newsletter Chaoyang Trap.
In recent weeks, as the Trump administration’s ever-changing trade policies enraged close American allies like Canada, a number of prominent commentators have even begun suggesting that perhaps the era of American exceptionalism was over. The coming decades, they argued, would now be defined by the rise of China.
“The Chinese century, brought to you by Donald Trump,” David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic and former speechwriter for George W. Bush said in a social media post on April 2. New York Times opinion writer Thomas Friedman published a column the same day raving about a recent trip to China during which he witnessed the country’s impressive infrastructure and technological development. It was headlined “I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America.”
“When people say this is the Chinese century, what they really mean is that the consensus that this will be the American century is being broken,” says Fang.
Growing Influence
When Trump’s most comprehensive tariffs caused global stock markets to take a nosedive earlier this week, US social media influencer Darren Watkins Jr., better known as IShowSpeed to his over 100 million collective followers, was wrapping up a sprawling tour across China with stops in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and other cities. Watkins spent days livestreaming himself mingling with Chinese celebrities and taking a boat ride with Hong Kong’s glittering skyline as the backdrop. By broadcasting in real time, IShowSpeed’s fans got an “unprecedented opportunity” to see “an unfiltered China,” Yaling Jiang, CEO of the strategy firm ApertureChina, wrote in her newsletter.
Many Americans got another direct glimpse inside China earlier this year when the US was set to ban TikTok nationwide. Anticipating the app might soon disappear, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to RedNote, another Chinese-owned social media app, where they saw posts of people in China showing off their domestic-made electric cars and comfortable urban apartments. TikTok itself, which was created by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance, is a testament to China’s growing soft power. Trump has vowed to save the app, and despite warnings from US lawmakers about the data security risks it poses, fewer Americans support banning it than did a few years ago.
