YIWU, China—Chinese makers of goods for export are seeking to turn inwards and sell domestically, a pivot considered key to making the world’s second-largest economy more self-sufficient.
In recent weeks, Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for the country to embrace what he calls domestic circulation—a policy designed to bolster local supply chains and encourage domestic consumption to make China more resilient to future commercial or geopolitical disruption, such as the coronavirus pandemic and the U.S.-China trade war.
While China’s exports have bounced back after the pandemic, the benefits have yet to wash through places such as this eastern China export hub, where struggling merchants say foreign orders remain depleted by the coronavirus.
Reorienting China’s formidable export machine to sell more domestically is easier said than done, say merchants in Yiwu, a city of 1.2 million people whose Yiwu International Trade City, a vast emporium of more than 75,000 wholesale stores, contributed about 2% of China’s $2.5 trillion in exports last year.
Many of the products made here, such as Christmas decorations and other low-cost, labor-intensive commodities, simply aren’t needed domestically in significant quantities. Only a small percentage of China’s 1.4 billion people are openly Christian, according to the U.S. human-rights group Freedom House.
Comments