In a section of the gargantuan Futian Market are a few dozen shops unimaginable in China 20 years ago. They are stuffed with Christmas lights, artificial trees, ornaments, tinsel, plastic angels, plastic wreaths, plastic bells, Santa suits, inflatable Santas, cardboard cutout Santas, Santas on a stick and just about any other Yuletide paraphernalia anyone could possibly want.
Increasingly, Christmas around the world is "made in China."
Ruled by the officially atheist Communist Party, China exported US$939 million in Christmas-related goods in the first 10 months of this year, more than half of it going to the US, according to China's Customs office. That doesn't include the US$6 billion worth of toys it exports annually.
China is the leading source of artificial Christmas trees, ornaments and Christmas lights for the US. A growing proportion of those items are made in Yiwu, a small city near China's east coast that boasts the country's largest small-commodities wholesale market.
"The Christmas market in Yiwu has been growing rapidly every year," said Li Genjun, deputy manager of Yiwu Spaceflight Craftwork Co, one of the city's largest maker of Christmas articles. "We barely have time to fill all the sales orders."
His company's revenues topped US$1.2 million last year and will more than double this year, he said.
While Washington regularly condemns Beijing for its human rights record and lack of religious freedom, economic ties between the two powers dominant the relationship.
That pragmatism is on display in Yiwu's markets, where merchants do not let ideological constraints get in the way of commerce. Framed pictures of Jesus and Bible scenes hang next to Islamic emblems. Even the Dalai Lama, banned in Tibet, is up for sale. A portrait of Tibetan Buddhism's highest leader was displayed in one shop alongside a picture of a Hindu god and Santa Claus.
Yiwu's Futian Market is a primary source of the world's knickknacks. The four-story mall, slightly smaller than the 4.2-million-square-foot Mall of America in Minnesota, America's, largest retail shopping place, has an entire floor devoted to hair ornaments and costume jewelry. Another floor offers only toys and the rest has "arts and crafts," including picture frames, candles, glassware, chirping bird cages and Lava lamps.
However, Futian Market is not a mall for ordinary shoppers. It sells only to merchants and middlemen who often buy by the container-load. While the Mall of America has under 600 stores, the Futian Market has more than 9,000 vendors occupying 7,000 shops. Each shop is really just a booth of about 30m2 for product samples.
The Futian Market was built because the city's original wholesale market, which sells just about every household item imaginable, was bursting out of its walls. Yiwu, a city of 360,000 has no obvious advantages for becoming the leading center of light industry.
About 3,000 foreign merchants, half of them from the Middle East, live in Yiwu year-round. Thousands more travel here every year on buying trips.
Like many places in China, it has abundant cheap labor. Two-thirds of the 316,000 farmers in the surrounding countryside have left the land to become part of Yiwu's export machine. Another 400,000 migrant workers have come from other provinces.
To be sure, the scale of operations in Yiwu is still small compared to factories in Guangdong province, just north of Hong Kong. Many consumer items, including Christmas products, still come from southern China.
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