SINGAPORE: Chinese e-commerce retailers were quick to cash in on the assassination attempt on former United States president Donald Trump last Saturday (Jul 13), with T-shirts of the image of him waving his fist going on sale hours after the news broke.
On popular e-commerce platform Taobao, the first batch of t-shirts went on sale less than three hours after the shooting happened in Pennsylvania at about 6.11pm local time, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.
A Taobao seller told the news outlet she put the T-shirts on sale as soon as she read the news. Within three hours, she received more than 2,000 orders from China and the US.
The photo on the T-shirts was taken by Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci. The image of Trump bleeding and his fist raised quickly went viral, with Mr Vucci’s Instagram and X – formerly known as Twitter – accounts chalking up almost 122,000 likes combined.
A photo of a Trump T-shirt also went viral on X, with more than 27,400 retweets and 264,000 likes. “This is China’s speed!” the user wrote.
Listings of the T-shirt, however, appear to have been taken down, going by a search of “Trump T-shirt” on Taobao by CNA on Monday (Jul 15) afternoon.
Images of the product listings also appear to have been censored on microblogging site Weibo. An image posted by Russian news agency Sputnik on its Weibo account about the product listings was censored.
Another post on Weibo, which stated that “T-shirts of Trump’s assassination attempt are already online on Taobao”, also had its images censored.
