Trump administration officials promoted prices as a way to stimulate American manufacturing and create more paid jobs. But the American owners of small businesses painted an image very different from the situation on Tiktok. In a video, the founder of a fashionable hair accessories brand has rolled eyes and explained that the company’s products “literally cannot be manufactured here”. In another, the CEO of a shoe company also said that China “is just the only place where I could make”. The owner of a company that makes self-truths have deplored how much his experiences have worked with suppliers in the United States compared to those in China. “What is about is that Americans are a bunch of babies and they are difficult to work,” he told the camera.
The founder of a London-based clothing brand has taken a more comforting tone, downloading a slideshow of photos of herself posing with the clothing workers with whom her company joins in China, in the “Look after you”. The text bunk on a photo said “Our victories are their victories”. Post Tiktok has received more than 55,000 likes, an indication of how attitudes towards China have evolved among at least certain Western consumers, compared to the past, when the country’s factories were mainly associated with cheap and fragile products. “Suddenly, people see, Oh, it is not this imagined” slave work “that makes my clothes, it is actually humans,” explains Tianyu Fang, a scholarship holder of the New America Think Tank and one of the co -founders of the Chinese Bulletin of Internet CHAOYANG TRAP culture.
In recent weeks, while constantly evolving trade policies of the Trump administration have rapped close American allies like Canada, a number of eminent commentators have even started to suggest that perhaps the era of American exceptionalism was over. The next decades, they say, are now defined by the rise of China.
“The Chinese century, brought by Donald Trump,” said David Frum, editor of the Atlantic and former speech editor for George W. Bush in an article on social networks on April 2. The New York Times opinion writer Thomas Friedman published a column on the same day with a recent trip to China during which he witnessed the impressive infrastructure of the country and technological development. He was titled “I just saw the future. It was not in America.”
“When people say it is the Chinese century, what they really mean is that the consensus that it will be the American century is broken,” explains Fang.
Growing influence
When Trump’s most complete prices led the world’s stock markets to take a nose earlier this week, the American social media influencer Darren Watkins Jr., better known as Ishowspeed to his more than 100 million collective followers, was packing a sprawling tour through China with stops in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and other cities. Watkins spent days in difficulty mingling with Chinese celebrities and walking in a boat with the sparkling roofs of Hong Kong in the background. By broadcasting in real time, fans of Ishowspeed had an “unprecedented opportunity” to see “an undeveloped China”, wrote Yaling Jiang, CEO of the Aperturechina strategy company, in its newsletter.
Many Americans had another direct overview in China earlier this year when the United States had to ban Tiktok nationally. By anticipating the application could soon disappear, hundreds of thousands of people faded for Rednote, another application of social media belonging to Chinese, where they saw positions of people in China show their electric cars made domestic and their comfortable urban apartments. Tiktok himself, who was created by the Chinese technology giant Bytedance, testifies to China’s soft power. Trump has promised to save the application, and despite the warnings of American legislators on data security risks he poses, fewer Americans support him for the ban on a few years ago.
