Chinese Manufacturers Have Been Turning to TikTok Diplomacy

New York Times

14-05-2025

A telegenic young woman called Luna is standing on the floor of a warehouse stacked with shipping boxes and sacks the color of sun-washed jade. When the video opens, she does a jumping half twist to face the camera and says, in smooth British-accented English, 'There's nothing a Chinese factory can't make.' Garment factories in Guangdong, she explains, are vital production partners for American brands like Brooks Brothers and Tommy Hilfiger. 'The scale of the factories in this region specifically, they're not massive,' she says, doing a practiced walk-and-talk. 'But all of them are willing to invest heavily in research and development.'
I started seeing videos like this one as I scrolled social media from my couch in the days after President Trump announced his sweeping new tariffs — Liberation Day, if you must — in early April. TikTok, in particular, was flooded with videos of young Chinese people, speaking from warehouses and factories in Guangdong and Shenzhen, in footage that reminded me of low-budget TV ads for local businesses. In one, a woman called Rosie — looking worried, as if trying to stop someone from making a huge mistake — struck poses while telling viewers which websites they could use to buy sportswear or appliances directly from Chinese manufacturers.
Americans had already been doing that for years. There are enormous communities on Reddit dedicated to connecting with Chinese proxy buyers, where WhatsApp numbers are traded like samizdat: You can text a stranger somewhere in China, get a menu of goods and order with a few clicks on PayPal. There are drop-shippers, too, a cottage industry of people who take orders through e-commerce sites, then have foreign manufacturers send the items directly to customers. You could even cut out the middlemen and contact a factory yourself. All this was enabled, in part, by a de minimis tariff exemption, in which goods worth less than $800 could be shipped from China or Hong Kong directly to the consumer without paying duties. But Trump ended that exception this year — and, of course, he also slapped almost all Chinese imports with a tariff of at least 145 percent.
Now Chinese manufacturers and American consumers both face tariff-induced anxieties — and so the flow of communication between them seems to be deepening. The videos I saw last month seemed to want to negotiate new trade arrangements directly with American consumers, peer to peer, outside official channels. They pitched factory-direct savings that might defray some of the rising costs of goods. Americans, they wagered, had found it easier to change their politics than their Amazon wish lists.
That these videos might find a receptive audience among young Americans isn't surprising. In this year's edition of the Harvard Youth Poll, 42 percent of some 2,000 respondents said they were struggling financially, up from 29 percent in 2019. I see the same feelings and preoccupations when I talk to my own friends: crumbling infrastructure, unaffordable health care, wealth disparities so deep that even people with jobs end up sleeping in their cars. All of this is paired with a shifting image of China among young Americans, who are about half as likely as their parents, and around one-fifth as likely as their grandparents, to see China as an 'enemy' of the United States.
You could sense this in March, when the American YouTuber Darren Jason Watkins Jr. (a.k.a. IShowSpeed) began traveling through China, livestreaming lengthy videos — the Beijing entry stretches to six hours — that have been viewed tens of millions of times. Both Watkins and a share of his audience were clearly excited by what they saw. On his visit to Shenzhen, he rode in an amphibious car made by the Chinese manufacturer BYD, amazing viewers with the sight of a street-legal S.U.V. wading easily into a body of water. 'China is legit the future,' one commenter wrote.
Watkins has close to 40 million subscribers on YouTube, many of whom must still be in their teens, living in an American car market where what passes for innovation is a modular tailgate. (BYD and other Chinese auto companies are effectively banned from the American market by protectionist policies that long predate Trump's.) In those streams, they may well have found a more optimistic, imaginative view of the future than their own country has lately conjured — the China that has built thousands of miles of high-speed rail while California struggles to lay down short stretches, or made its wind- and solar-power generation eclipse its fossil-fuel power capacity while Trump cancels federal grants for renewable energy.
This intoxicating portrait is, of course, an exercise in image-building on the part of China. Watkins's streams can be entertaining, but they certainly aren't an objective exploration of Chinese life; they are a kind of glossy tourist video, made with the apparent blessing of a Chinese government that wouldn't have given him latitude to document, say, the blanket surveillance, political repression or forced labor that make it possible for the nation to complete those ambitious infrastructure projects. (Or the massive 'ghost cities' and excess rail lines that sit unused.) In that sense, the streams are not so different from the videos in which telegenic young people crow about their factories' making garments for Lululemon or Lacoste, as if they might sell you those items without the retail markup. What we are seeing online tends to be China's very best face.
Still, the accelerating flow of video between the two countries might be rewiring our relationship. Something like an anonymous TikTok account posting unflattering comparisons between New York and China's subway systems — the former rat-infested and leaky, the latter immaculate and full of polished stone — feels like a new evolution in that exchange, not least because Americans seem increasingly willing to admit to its veracity. Those manufacturers' videos fall into a wave of soft, small-scale influence-peddling. Somewhere beneath the negotiations of two nations, another begins between individuals, one of whom really wants new leggings at a steep discount, another of whom needs to sell exactly that.
Recently, I asked a couple of friends — both are in their late 30s, and have lived in China their entire lives — how their own views of America have shifted over time. Both said that they ravenously consumed American culture, and saw the United States as a nation of cohesive, dynamic people. But over the last 10 years, their sense was that America was degrading, its democracy growing more brittle; they saw our gun violence, political clashes and treatment of immigrants as signs of a country whose flaws were becoming mortal wounds.
Yet seeing the wrinkles and scars of a country they had admired also humanized it. Anti-Americanism, one told me, was not a default perspective among his peers, and most of his younger colleagues drew clear distinctions between the American people and the American government. When TikTok was briefly banned, he said, many Americans started joining the Chinese platform RedNote, creating a moment when people in the two countries were speaking to one another through social media. 'From the posts of countless ordinary Americans, we know that the United States is neither heaven nor hell,' he told me; American life was 'a mixture of happiness, pain, trouble and curiosity, just like my own life.' Grand projects of geopolitical maneuvering will continue between the two nations. But there is also a growing dialogue between the peoples themselves, and the possibility that it could shape public opinion as much as anything happening in Beijing or Washington.