Stacks of unsold socks, gloves, toys, and storage boxes now clog warehouse floors in Yiwu—the Chinese city that once sent cut-price trinkets to every corner of the planet.
Cross‑border e‑commerce orders from the world’s biggest small‑commodity hub have plunged by roughly 70 percent since the U.S.–China tariff standoff escalated, a local freight‑forwarding executive says. The shock has hit Yiwu’s merchants and logistics firms so hard that many are teetering on the brink of collapse.
In April, Washington raised average duties on Chinese imports to 145 percent, and Beijing hit back with 125 percent tariffs on U.S. goods.
With those parcels now taxed—and Washington and Beijing still locked in the broader tariff standoff—exporters in Yiwu say their business model no longer works.
“It feels like the sky has fallen,” Mr. Lin, a cross‑border seller, told The Epoch Times. Lin supplies the U.S. market through Temu, the overseas arm of Chinese retail giant Pinduoduo, but can no longer make the math work.
“They force you to slash prices, or they fine you for slow movers. In the end, you lose both goods and cash,” he said.
Lin has already cut staff, will vacate his multi‑thousand‑square‑meter warehouse in June, and will move into a space a fraction of the size.
“Our sales are down 50 to 60 percent. I can’t sleep. There’s no way out, so we keep going and hope,” he stated.
Mr. Xu, another Yiwu-based merchant from Henan Province, was blunter still.
“Foreign trade is now the hardest line of work. The U.S. market is dead; small parcels have zero orders. Every day is confusion, anxiety, pain,” he said, adding that he works more than 12 hours a day with no weekends yet sees no path back to growth.
Yiwu hosts more than 20,000 freight‑forwarding companies that once funneled local factory output through nearby Ningbo Port to the United States, according to Mr. Wang, owner of a Yiwu-based international‑logistics company.
Roughly half have shut their doors since the tariff fight began, he told The Epoch Times.
“Our weekly containers have dropped from a steady 80 to fewer than 40,” he said. Forwarders now demand additional cash payments from customers mid‑voyage in case tariffs rise before a ship reaches a U.S. port, Wang said.
“If the duties jumped when the goods reach the U.S. and the client walked away, we’d be bankrupt, with nowhere to dump the cargo,” he said.
The squeeze is most apparent for sellers who rely on the Fulfillment by Amazon program, where storage fees, shipping charges, and now punitive tariffs can wipe out thin margins, according to Wang.
He said Washington now levies duties of about 145 percent on clothing and up to 245 percent on items such as syringe needles. To cope, forwarders cram only a small volume of high‑duty goods—about 16 cubic meters (roughly 565 cubic feet)—into each container and fill the rest with lower‑tariff items, hoping to dilute the overall tax bill.
The tactic buys time but carries serious risks: A single mis‑declaration can trigger fines “in the tens of thousands of dollars,” he warned.
Factories across Yiwu are idling lines, cutting wages, or shutting down altogether as unsold inventory piles up, according to Lin. He puts the casualty rate among would‑be cross‑border sellers at “about 99 percent,” with only a fortunate few still turning a profit.
Even logistics firms may not last, Wang adds. If the tariff stalemate drags on another three months, he predicts, Yiwu’s freight‑forwarding sector will shrink to roughly 5,000 companies.
For a city whose prosperity was built on the promise of friction‑free global trade, the tariff walls feel like a dead end.
“We’re worn out,” Lin said. “But there’s nowhere else to go.”
