By Casey Hall
LILING, China, May 8 (Reuters) - Emblazoned on a box of Chinese fireworks is a picture of U.S. President Donald Trump raising his fist in defiance after a failed assassination bid in 2024, juxtaposed with the U.S. flag and the slogan “Fight for America”.
This year’s celebrations for U.S. Independence Day on July 4 will be “a lot better” than last year, said Wilson Lam, U.S. business manager for Black Scorpion Fireworks in China’s southern city of Liling.
Last year manufacturers were struggling with tariff hikes of more than 100 percentage points, Lam said, but their reversal has boosted orders from U.S. customers by 15% to 30% this year for his brand.
It is the overseas face of a three-decades-old factory in a region that has turned out fireworks for more than 1,300 years, originally meant to dispel evil spirits.
And Trump’s visit to Beijing, set for mid-May, just weeks before the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence, shows how intertwined the world’s two biggest economies remain, Lam said, with the U.S. taking almost 40% of China’s fireworks exports.
“Husbands and wives fight too, that’s normal,” he said, speaking amid a sea of fireworks boxes draped in U.S. patriotic symbols, from eagles to the Statue of Liberty.
“But we can’t live without each other because we are the biggest trading partners in the world.”
Most July 4 shipments have already been delivered or are in transit, said Lam, so there will be no delays from a temporary production halt this week for safety inspections after a deadly blast at a factory in the area.
MADE IN CHINA FOR U.S. INDEPENDENCE DAY
Some boxes bore the ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan from Trump’s presidential campaign that promised to bring home the jobs U.S. workers had lost to China and other nations.
China’s exports of fireworks accounted for two-thirds of global sales last year, although their value, at $1.14 billion, shrank from $1.16 billion the year before, data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity shows.
Factories usually ship orders in April for July 4 events, but many went on hold last year, after U.S. tariffs spiked 145 percentage points following Trump’s “Liberation Day” levies.
Retaliation from China forced Washington to lower the barriers within weeks. Lam’s fireworks, shipped after Independence Day, were set off during other celebrations instead, such as New Year.
Black Scorpion’s factories, where workers make the products largely by hand, are located in China’s “fireworks corridor” in the provinces of Hunan and Jiangxi, where state media say hundreds of thousands of people are employed.
‘LET THEM MAKE FIREWORKS’
As much as 70% of their raw material comes from the regional city of Liuyang, with more than 400 fireworks stores and just under 1.5 million people. Tourists flock to regular fireworks festivals there and in its smaller neighbour, Pingxiang.
Liu Fangguo, the founder of the Shengding Fireworks Factory in Pingxiang, has made the painful decision to largely divert exports away from the United States and escape the bother of tariffs.
“We’ve tried every means to shift to domestic sales or sell to other countries,” he said. “We gradually recovered but the impact (of tariffs) is still there.”
Eric Zheng, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in the commercial hub of Shanghai, said its members were wary that China-U.S. ties could sour again, but most expected Trump’s visit to extend a short-term “truce” in trade hostilities.
“If you move away from China, it will be a loss for U.S. consumers,” Zheng said, adding that they hankered for China’s well-made affordable exports, from fireworks to garments and shoes.
“So let them make fireworks.”
(Reporting by Casey Hall, Xiaoyu Yin and Go Nakamura; Writing by Marius Zaharia; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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