Meaghan Tobin
speaker
50 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Meaghan Tobin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yes. Which is why I went to Guangzhou, a city in the southeast that is in many ways the heart of the global garment industry. It's where many of Shein's hauls are made. And I wanted to go there to see what the end of this loophole means for the millions of people who work in this industry. And ultimately what it means for the fate of fast fashion.
So the thing you need to know is that China makes nearly one in every three garments sold around the world. Wow. And much of that comes from Guangzhou in the factories that are part of the Xi'an network. And in a lot of ways, this city is really the global hub of garment manufacturing. And I wanted to see what the impact of the end of the de minimis loophole was going to be on the ground here.
So my colleague C. Zhao and I went to Guangzhou to check it out. Many of the garment factories in Guangzhou are essentially open-air workshops. They're like big warehouses with garage doors that open onto the street. And they're full of sewing machines that are clacking away at all hours of the day and night. And different workshops have different functions.
So some places might assemble whole garments and other places will just sew on zippers and ruffles.
this kind of informal market where a lot of the workshops go to recruit their labor for the day. And hundreds of managers from different factories were lined up on the sidewalk looking for people to do different sewing tasks all day long.
So some places are putting together the main seams of a garment, and then down the street is a place that will sew in the zippers, and another one that will do the elastic waistband. And then there's a different company that will come and pick up the packages and bring them to a collection point.
So all over the city, you can see trucks that are piled high with rolls of fabric just rocketing down the street. And at the same time, they're being passed by guys with carts and driving vans who are collecting the finished products and taking them to the airport. So there's this whole ecosystem of businesses that are all interconnected in the task of making clothes as quickly as possible.
If you can imagine that assembly line spread over an entire city, that is essentially what it is like. So you've got just whole neighborhoods that are geared toward the production of clothes. And This industry is a really important part of the economy there. It employs millions of people, and a lot of them are migrant workers who come to the city from all over China.
So we talked to managers and workers, and what they told us is that business was already down. In the month of April, Xi'an was putting in fewer orders in anticipation of the loophole being closed.
And because of that, factories were hiring fewer workers. Some people said they were considering moving their factories to other provinces where they thought they could pay workers less, or even out of the country to places like Vietnam. And many of the people we spoke to had actually seen nearby businesses close down. Now, we were in Guangzhou on the day the loophole closed.
And one of the people that we talked to was Han Junshou. Junshou is 30, and she is the second-generation factory owner. She makes house slippers and bags and other accessories, and she sells them on Shein and Timu. And one of her most popular products is a pair of fluffy socks.
And she was telling us how she gets inspiration for her colorways by looking at the colors of outfits that Kendall Jenner posts on Instagram.
This is so cute.
But Jun Cho says that her orders in April were down nearly 20% compared to previous months. And she's already starting to look for other markets to make up for the loss of American consumers. How's she going to do that? Well, if Americans aren't going to buy things because they're more expensive, Jin Cho is going to have to sell her fluffy socks and bags in other places.
So she's looking to Europe and South America. And that's something we heard from other business owners too. There are all these chat forums online that are almost offering like crowdsource tech support. Teaching people how to set up an account in Bahasa Indonesia to target Indonesian customers or what buttons to click to get set up to sell Mercado Libre in South America.
That's right. The US is China's biggest single market. It's a big economy with a lot of consumers who have enough disposable income that they can buy reusable water bottles and strollers and toasters and flash drives and basically anything they need or want from China.
So on top of looking abroad for other markets, factory owners like Juncho are also trying to target shoppers in China. And the Chinese government really needs this to happen because the economy has been pretty slow in the last couple of years and exports have really been the main driver of growth. But the problem is people in China have been really careful about spending money.
And Junqiu ultimately sees this as a lose-lose situation. She thinks that not only are Chinese manufacturers going to suffer, but American shoppers are going to also. She said that China makes so much stuff. If you cut out China, where are you going to be able to buy all your products? And she definitely thinks people in the U.S.
won't be able to replicate manufacturing the way that Guangzhou has. That there was no way that Guangzhou wasn't going to be the engine of the global garment industry.
Well, President Trump could change his mind. He could pause or reverse his position on closing the loophole altogether. Yeah, that has happened before. Exactly. He's rolled back the tariffs from an additional 145% down to 30%. But that's for most goods coming from China.
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