An owner of a flag shop in Yiwu's Futian market displays a Donald Trump 2020 presidential election flag. Many Chinese plants received surging orders for US presidential election flags recently but they also face problems like surging shipping fee. Photo: Yang Hui/GT

As the presidential election campaigning was still running intensely in the US, vendors in Yiwu, East China's Zhejiang Province, already noticed the close race between the two candidates over the past months and gave their answer days before November 3.

Campaign product sales for this year's US election are significantly lower than the previous one, but we have definitely "sold more products related to Trump than Biden," a sales manager from a flag manufacturer in Yiwu, also the home to the world's largest wholesale market, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

"From June to August, we sold a total of 42,245 pieces of campaign accessories for Trump, twice as many as those for Biden," a company representative of another producer and seller of campaign flags, banners and other accessories from Jinhua, a city close to Yiwu, told the Global Times. 

According to the representative, the orders stopped since October, but in total Trump's election campaign accessories made by his factories not only exceed Biden in volume, but also in variety. For Biden, most products sold are garden flags, on top of ordinary flags, hand signal flags and banners. However for Trump, the products also include couplets, which is the top selling item. 

Although the representative declined to offer details of the clients purchasing those products, he said that all of the items were eventually sold to the US. 

"I think Trump will have the last laugh," Zhang Hong, owner of a textile factory in Yiwu, told the Global Times on Tuesday, noting that he's observing a 4:6 ratio of demand for the products for Biden and Trump campaigns, including banners and hand signal flags.

A T-shirt producer from Guangzhou in South China's Guangdong Province also told the Global Times on Tuesday that orders for the Trump campaign exceed the orders for Biden, and there was a significant rise for T-shirt orders for both candidates in July.

"More than 60 percent of the products made for the US election are made for the Trump campaign," the manager told the Global Times.

Moreover, managers from some of these firms said they've also observed a changing trend and intense race between Biden and Trump over the past months.

Zou Xia, sales manager of Guangzhou Huifeng Flag, which has been making flags for the last 25 years, said they received a "huge" order for Biden election flags in July.  "We made 100,000 flags in 10 days for the order," Zou told the Global Times.

The representative from the aforementioned Jinhua factory also noticed a surge in demand for products for the Biden campaign, though the total number was still lagging behind Trump.  

The predictions based on the sales number from Yiwu have been termed as Yiwu index by those who follow them. The index, though lacking an accurate scientific base, has indeed proved its reliability before - it has successfully predicted a Trump victory in 2016, according to the demand of campaign products for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. 

Although there are no official figures showing how many firms in Yiwu are doing products related to US presidential election, it is believed that many of them were made and exported from the city, which is known as "the world's supermarket," and also manufactures 60 percent of the world's Christmas goods ranging from Christmas trees and lights to toys and clothing.

The Yiwu index has also been a hot topic on Chinese social media days before the election. "They [Yiwu vendors] may know nothing about US politics, but they may be the ones who have the earliest hint of the election result," some Chinese netizens joked.


Newspaper headline: Yiwu sold more Trump-related products