Yiwu: the mecca of ‘made in China’ consumerism
The International City of Commerce in the south-eastern province of Zhejiang is the place of origin of most of the Christmas decorations sold these weeks all over the world. A gigantic 6.4 million square metre wholesale market open seven days a week for traders from all over the world who are arriving en masse again in 2024.
Milan (AsiaNews) - In these weeks leading up to Christmas, you may have happened to enter some Chinese megastore in search of cheap decorations and ornaments. Wandering through the aisles, many will have wondered where the vast assortment of Christmas items on sale comes from.
In most cases, the answer to this question is Yiwu, a town in the southeastern province of Zhejiang that is home to the largest wholesale market on the planet. Located about 300 kilometres from Shanghai, the Yiwu International City of Commerce (Yiwu guoji shangmao cheng) - this is its official name - is the mecca of hyper-consumerism.
Founded in 1982, the uniqueness of the permanent fair can be deduced from the numbers: 6.4 million square metres of floor space, five four-storey buildings crammed with stands, 75,000 suppliers, 2.1 million products from almost 30 different genres. It is so big that to visit it all would take at least a week.
Imagine, then, entering a city packed with shops, a kind of shopping paradise where you can find anything and everything: stationery and hi-tech, household goods, clothing and accessories, themed decorations, musical instruments, games and much more at a super-cheap price. For example, for the equivalent of EUR 50 you can take home two pairs of sunglasses, an electro-acoustic guitar or even a tablet. Of this merchandise, only the Christmas and decorative items are made directly in the Yiwu production district, the rest comes from other industrial zones in China.
Open all year round seven days a week, except for national holidays, the Yiwu market welcomes more than 500,000 buyers from all over the world every year. Some online sites offer advice on how to make the most of the visit, suggesting potential foreign buyers to bring cash (many shops do not accept credit cards) and to arrive already with a clear idea of the items to buy, the quantities and the budget to spend.
Since haggling over the price of products is an accepted practice, when faced with stubborn suppliers the best tactic is to pretend to walk away and forgo the transaction: rather than let the deal fall through, the former will reconsider and agree to sell at a lower price.
Entrepreneurs who have difficulty finding their way around this huge bazaar can always hire an intermediary to help them find the best suppliers and conduct negotiations. While for those who cannot visit the fair in person, the solution is just a click away: simply consult the websites of specialised online retailers to receive goods from Yiwu directly to your home.
In Yiwu, however, foreigners are not just passing through, many decide to settle there permanently, so much so that of its 2 million inhabitants,10,000 are foreigners from more than 100 different nationalities.
In May this year, the local authorities also launched ‘Yijing’, the first app to provide immigration services to foreign entrepreneurs. Created to simplify procedures such as registering accommodation and applying for residence permits, it also allows them to meet needs related to daily life. Indeed, the platform's aim is to attract foreign investors to Yiwu, making their stay in the Chinese city more comfortable.
Moreover, the presence of the latter is steadily increasing: in the first seven months of 2024, Yiwu issued more than 9,000 residence permits, while the value of foreign trade reached 379.10 billion yuan (or almost 50 billion euros), an increase of 18.1 per cent year-on-year.
Mohamed, a 51-year-old Yemeni interpreter, has been living in Yiwu for more than 20 years, where he moved after perfecting his Chinese language studies. As he recalls, Pakistanis were among the first to do business in Yiwu when the market was still small and decadent. Back then, Chinese vendors only had small stalls and queued up in front of the Honglu Hotel rooms to show their wares to foreign businessmen.
Over the years, the International Trade City of Yiwu hwua certainly undergone a remarkable evolution that has made it one of the most important trading hubs in China and the world. As some Chinese traders living in Italy report, however, the geopolitical uncertainty caused by the war in Ukraine and the related increase in freight costs, especially by rail, have reportedly limited imports from the Zhejiang city recently, preferring products made in Italian wholesalers.
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