Headline, May 09 2025/ ''' SOCIAL TIKTOK SOCCER '''

''' SOCIAL TIKTOK

 SOCCER '''

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CHINESE manufacturers are flooding TikTok and other social media apps with direct appeals to American shoppers, urging people to buy luxury items straight from their factories.

And amid the threats of sky-high tariffs on Chinese exports, Americans seem to be all in.

The pitch in the videos is that people can buy leggings and handbags exactly like those from brands like Lululemon, Hermes and Birkenstock, but for a fraction of the price.

They claim, often falsely, that the products are made in the same factories that produce items for those brands.

American influencers have embraced the videos, promoting the factories and driving downloads of Chinese shopping apps like DHGate and Taobao as a way for shoppers to save money if the price of goods skyrocket under President Trump's tariffs on Chinese imports.

DHGate was recently among the 10 most downloaded apps from Apple's and Google's app stores.

The videos are surging in popularity on TikTok and Instagram, racking up millions of views and thousands of likes. Many of the posts also seem to have elicited Americans' sympathy for China in comments, such as '' Trump bullied the wrong country '' and '' China won this war.''

The videos offer a rare outlet for Chinese factory owners and workers to speak directly to American consumers through social media apps that are technically banned in China.

And their popularity in America highlights increasing social support for China on social media, similar to the outcry over the federal government's potential ban of TikTok.

'' It's activating people politically in a similar way that you saw when we were going to cancel TikTok, but this time in the context of tariffs and the overall relationship with the two countries,'' said Matt Pearl, a director who focuses on technology issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

'' It does demonstrate their ability to communicate with American consumers to drive a message about our dependence on Chinese goods.''

Mr. Pearl suggested that the Chinese government might be allowing the videos to proliferate, since it has otherwise tended to discourage its citizens from posting videos that infringe on trade-marked products from Western countries.

The volume of TikTok videos urging users to source products directly from Chinese factories soared almost 250 percent during the week of April 13, according to Margot Hardy, an analyst at Graphika, a social network analysis firm.

On TikTok, the hashtag Chinese Factory had 29,500 posts on April 23; on Instagram, it has 27,300 posts.

Retail experts and vendors in China - say it's unlikely that the most viral videos, which claim to be manufacturers for brands like Lululemon and Hermes, are peddling authentic products from those labels.

Those factories often sign strict nondisclosure agreements and are unlikely to destroy their long-term relationships with major brands in exchange for hawking a few goods through direct sales, said Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester.

'' A Lululemon or Chanel's interests right now in China are probably No. 100 on the list of things that the Chinese trade minister and officials there are concerned about,'' Ms. Kodali said.

Still, the questions around the veracity of the goods aren't stopping demand.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on U.S. Shoppers, Tech Companies, and State-of-the-World, continues. The World Students Society thanks Sapna Maheshwari and Ang Li.

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