Trump's tariffs put China's e-commerce superpowers on the examination

The auditorium in Alibaba's headquarters was full of participants, leaned against the wall and pressed onto the stairs. Hundreds of Chinese small entrepreneurs listened to the stage as electricity of representatives from Alibaba, the Chinese online shopping giant, to calm them down from China's resistance in view of the eye-like America.

“Since the beginning of April,” said Wang Shan, Executive for Digital Marketing, “we have researched and discussed and discussed in such a rapidly changing situation in this type of political environment, what should our methods and attitude be?”

“Every consensus is that the business still has to go out,” she continued. “We think that what it ends up is testing is our own ability.”

The way of thinking of the battlefield has become the norm for a variety of Chinese who are committed to selling online in the United States. The threat from which they are exposed to the tariffs is immense: the United States are China's largest export market for online trading, which, according to official Chinese data, is more than a third of sales. This includes individual Americans who are dependent on Shein for cheap bathing clothes or Temu for 2 dollar garlic presses as well as for small business owners who use platforms such as DHGATE or Alibaba, for buying bulk goods.

The Alibaba Conference in the Hangzhou of the company in East China gave an insight into the way in which the country became such a giant in online shopping. And it suggested how the sector could survive the crisis.

China's success in e-commerce has become a central component of the saga of the broader economic advancement of the country. Few people better symbolize the country's history as Alibaba's founder Jack Ma, whose journey from the English teacher to the online shopping entrepreneur finally made him one of the richest men in the world.