Chinese censors delete, hide links to Trump shooting T-shirts

Authorities in China appear to have moved to take down T-shirts bearing images of the attempted assassination of former U.S. president and Republican candidate Donald Trump from the country’s major e-commerce platforms after the items started to sell fast online in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

China’s foreign ministry spokesperson on Sunday extended President Xi Jinping’s “sympathies” to Trump in the wake of the attack at a July 13 Republican campaign rally in Butler, Pa.

Yet no sooner had Trump been declared “safe,” after escaping with an injury to his ear, factories in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong started churning out T-shirts bearing news photos from the immediate aftermath of the shooting, including the iconic shot from Evan Vucci of the Associated Press.

Some bore slogans as well as the photo, including “Fight! Fight! Fight!,” the words mouthed by Trump in his defiant gesture following the attack.

Others called to “Make America Great Again,” others omitted a word, rendering the Trump campaign slogan as “Make America Again,” according to Reuters news footage and photos of the garments pulled from Chinese e-commerce platforms JD.com and Taobao.

“Shooting Makes Me Stronger,” read another shirt, according to the Associated Press.

Reuters quoted clothing merchant Zhong Jiachi, as saying via Douyin, China’s TikTok, that he had sold around 40 T-shirts with the image of Trump just after he was shot, within 24 hours.

“(The sales) exceeded my expectations. I didn’t expect that Trump would have so many fans,” Zhong said via his channel.

Most of the shirt designs depicted Trump as bloodied and defiant, and the first presses started rolling shortly after U.S. President Joe Biden spoke about the shooting at around 8 p.m. Washington time on Saturday, according to media reports.

Copyright concerns

Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post quoted a Taobao vendor called Li Jinwei as saying that it was the work of just over an hour to download the photos and print out the T-shirts.

“We put the T-shirts on Taobao as soon as we saw the news about the shooting, though we hadn’t even printed them, and within three hours we saw more than 2,000 orders from both China and the US,” she told the paper, which is owned by Taobao parent company Alibaba.

But Chinese government censors appeared to be moving to shut down the online boom in Trump-related sales, with keyword searches for “Trump T-shirt” on Monday yielding no results on JD.com and unrelated Trump T-shirts on Taobao, the agency reported.

However, shooting-related Trump T-shirts were still visible on the Chinese-language version of auction site eBay on Tuesday, making the garments still available to buyers with an overseas bank card or a U.S.-based friend willing to mail them to China.

According to the AP, it’s possible that vendors in China were being blocked or hidden due to copyright concerns around the images.

“The Associated Press is proud of Evan Vucci’s photo and recognizes its impact,” the agency quoted Lauren Easton, AP’s vice president of corporate communications, as saying. “In addition, we reserve our rights to this powerful image.”

However, an AP journalist was able to order a shirt with an image of the moment for 61 yuan (US$8), even though the original link said the shirt was no longer available, it said.

“A customer service representative said it violated regulations, without elaborating, but then provided a link to order the shirt,” the report said, adding that Alibaba, which owns Taobao and JD.com did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The online T-shirt sales came as Trump’s designated running mate JD Vance echoed the former president’s tough line on China. 

In a Monday interview with Fox News, Vance called China the “biggest threat” to the United States, and said that Washington’s continued support for Ukraine had distracted from the “real issue, which is China.”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.