The auditorium at Alibaba’s headquarters was packed with attendees, leaning against the wall and squeezing onto the stairs. Hundreds of Chinese small-business owners listened raptly as a stream of representatives from Alibaba, the Chinese online shopping giant, stepped onstage to reassure them of China’s resilience in the face of America’s eye-watering tariffs.
“Since the beginning of April,” said Wang Shan, a digital marketing executive, “we’ve been researching and discussing, in this kind of policy environment, in such a rapidly changing situation, what should our methods and attitude be?”
“Everyone’s consensus is that business still has to go out,” she continued. “We think that what it tests in the end is our own ability.”
The battlefield mind-set has become the norm for a vast number of Chinese people engaged in the business of online selling to the United States. The threat they face from the tariffs is immense: The United States is China’s biggest export market for online trade, making up more than one-third of sales, according to official Chinese data. That includes individual Americans who rely on Shein for cheap swimwear or Temu for $2 garlic presses, as well as small-business owners who use platforms like DHGate or Alibaba to buy bulk goods to resell.
The Alibaba conference, in the company’s home city of Hangzhou, in eastern China, offered a glimpse into how the country became such a behemoth in online shopping in the first place. And it suggested how the sector might weather the crisis.
China’s success at e-commerce has become a central part of the saga of the country’s broader economic rise. Few people better symbolize the country’s rags-to-riches story than Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, whose journey from English teacher to online-shopping entrepreneur eventually made him one of the world’s richest men.
