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.
That journey was made possible in part by the vast ecosystem that China has built to support its export machine. It spans not only factories, marketers and shipping companies, but also drop-shipping suppliers, who handle sourcing and delivery on behalf of sellers; live-streamers, who hawk their products, carnival-style, on short video apps; and private tutors dedicated to helping the country’s countless small-business owners sell internationally.
The Chinese government has in recent years also made expanding online international sales a priority, offering companies tax breaks and encouraging universities to introduce related majors. Hangzhou is dotted with gleaming towers offering discounted office space to e-commerce entrepreneurs.
Now with the tariffs, support from the government and companies is ramping up even more. Officials in Hangzhou have promised to help companies pivoting to non-American markets with legal paperwork. Employees from Amazon, which has built a center in Hangzhou to provide training to people selling on its platform, were hosting a session last week on the tariffs for their own merchants.
At the Alibaba conference, which was open to anyone interested in learning about selling abroad, company employees reassured attendees that they would help them take care of customs procedures. Online platforms have also promised tens of millions of dollars to help exporters advertise domestically instead.
As a result, the mood of many businesspeople at Alibaba’s headquarters was concerned but undeterred.
Qiu Leisi, 36, who plans to open an online store selling plus-size clothing to retailers in the United States and Europe, said she would simply pass the expense of the tariffs on to her customers.
“American business owners should see that the unfairness is coming from their own people,” she said, sitting in a coffee shop outside the Alibaba auditorium. (In a sign of how much interest the conference had drawn, the baristas cited a 50-minute wait for drinks.)
Ms. Qiu did not worry that Americans might balk at the higher costs. Her parents ran a hardware factory where one-third of business came from the United States, but they had offloaded some of their unsold inventory to India at a slight discount.
“They’ll give concessions to people who are friendly to us,” Ms. Qiu said of her parents. “Even if we lose America, there are many other countries that will step up.”
Indeed, a key part of China’s strategy is to channel its exports to other countries. Even before the latest tariffs, as U.S.-China tensions grew, Chinese entrepreneurs had been focusing on expanding in Southeast Asia and Europe.
But that transition can only be done so quickly, especially for people whose customers are primarily American.
That includes Shawn Zhao, whose company, HyperSKU, helps foreign small-business owners source goods like yoga mats from Chinese factories. About half of his business comes from the United States, and he had spent the last few weeks revising cost estimates for his clients there, as the tariffs climbed ever higher.
To adapt, he has slashed his advertising budget for the United States and is focusing more on Europe.
He has also has been focusing on personalized products that he hopes shoppers will think are worth the premium, such as engraved earrings, or lockets with their pets’ photos. That was where China’s supply chain was irreplaceable, he said, because it could deliver highly specific goods, in small batches, better than any other country.
Still, he expected at least a 20 percent drop in revenue.
“There are some things in the market that are beyond your control, like political factors,” Mr. Zhao said over lunch in one of Hangzhou’s many high-end malls that showcase its status as China’s high-tech capital. “You can only try to assess, under the worst-case scenario, can the company keep going? Make sure you have a clear accounting.”
The optimism at the Alibaba conference may run up against other realities, too.
Some sellers suggested getting around the tariffs by redirecting goods through a third country. But under pressure from the Trump administration, some countries have promised to crack down on the practice.
Several people also said that looking overseas was less a choice than a necessity. China’s domestic market is hypercompetitive, and because of a slowing economy, people are reluctant to spend. That is a reason the government itself has been so eager to push overseas e-commerce, too.
“The market is only so big, and the merchants are so saturated, so our share of the pie is getting smaller and smaller,” said Fu Sicong, a 27-year-old wearing hip square-frame glasses, who with two friends runs an online shop selling car decorations. After his domestic business had fallen by about 20 percent in the last year, he decided to try Europe and the United States, where the profit margins are generally higher. “Even if we can’t do it well, we still have to do it.”
More than the government subsidies, or the e-commerce companies’ reassurances, it was that resolve — to do business no matter what — that seemed to be fueling many entrepreneurs’ confidence.
Inside an office building called Building Dreams, in one of Hangzhou’s many industrial parks dedicated specifically to cross-border e-commerce, Li Tongzi, 30, brushed off the fact that his sales of bracelets and fortunetelling accessories to the United States had evaporated. He would double down on the Chinese market, despite the narrowing profits.
“It’s just a matter of whether you make more money or less,” he said. “Even if we only earn 10 cents, we dare to do it.”
Siyi Zhao contributed research.
