By Yoichi Shimatsu
Exclusive to Rense
5-16-25

Intro - The self-inflicted demise of Walmart’s supply chain in China has at last arrived as Trump’s import tariffs start to bite into profit margins and annihilate the superstore’s long-standing scam to evade U.S. taxes by concentrating nearly all its product orders in a ruthless strategy to exploit the rock-bottom cheapo Chinese labor. The legendary founder of that ubiquitous chain of box stores the late Sam Walton began Walmart’s rise in the state of Arkansas aka Clinton-Rockefeller country where labor exploitation based on endemic poverty was the key to ill-gotten wealth for unashamed commercial exploiters (Have I got a bargain for you!). Now at last economic reality sets in with the Trump policy of tariff equity on both sides of the bilateral trade relations, which blows apart the economic-financial bondage imposed on grossly underpaid and overworked Chinese peons at crude factories in evermore remote rural hinterlands.

It’s unlikely that Walmart can rise again after the crunch of import tariffs imposed by team Trump. Don’t shed tears for the Walton heirs - who had idle decades to restore “Made in America” but instead continued to demand ever-harder working conditions on the Asian work-force. The Walmart inspectors and price negotiators dispatched to China are the most reviled invaders since the era of the Boxer Rebellion against colonialist exploiters. Shed no tears for the Walton clan who’ve spent millions on a questionable art museum in Arkansas but not a lot for the children of their suppliers’ contract laborers.

Tariffs are not the underlying cause of the financial disaster for the biggest of big-box stores - it’s the absurdity of loading millions of tons of cheap products onto containers at China’s humongous ports for shipment across the world’s widest ocean and then loading the cargo of steel boxes at Los Angeles port onto trucks parading along American highways as far as the Gulf and even the Atlantic coast. Not a single bought-off “environmental” group ever challenged the sum-total of those “carbon emissions” - which could have be drastically reduced with “Made in America” by American labor. This entire monstrous enterprise has the stench of treason against this nation’s forgotten army of the unemployed – whose low-end lives are supported by taxpayer dollars instead of productive jobs in knitting mills, sewing shops and metal fabrication plants.

Aside from upcoming tariffs, there are other factors at work to undermine Walmart: the steady decline of the U.S. dollar, rising costs of shipping and ground transport, insurance and labor wages for unloading the foreign-made goods - none of which can be rolled back or otherwise reduced. For a nation of compulsive shoppers the specter of bankruptcy for major retailers will soon become an immediate reality for communities long-since dependent on big box operations rather than mom-and-pop local shops or community-based markets - which have all but disappeared from the American landscape. Whose fault is that? The greedy rich and a society gone soft and too lazy to provide the necessities of modern life for itself – as in the days of an invincible America of our grandparents. So don’t blame the White House – the demise of runaway sweatshops have been a longtime coming. Trump’s imposition of tariffs are merely a test of the viability of the present shopping model, and the bloated big stores are certain to fail that test. Instead of carping about the loss of Walmart, get a real job or start sewing for your children’s attire. Nowhere as resilient as during my youth, a lazy loser USA will require perhaps decades to wean away an American society gone soft, idle, greedy and sad to say – stupid. Turn off the TV and get busy in your workshop or sewing room!

Revival of Skill, Craft and Production

As a journalist who has covered China, Japan, Vietnam and other hard-working parts of Asia for more than three decades, my impression is that small-brand clusters of creative “young brands” in low-cost mini- will gain the upper hand during the post-Walmart era by aggressively filling the vacuum left by the big box stores and a moribund fashion industry in its death throes. That process of self-development of creators and vendors without “aid” from bankers or being subject to exclusive manufacturing contracts has already blossomed and expanded in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand over the past two decades – and China is no exception as young people turn to self-employment rather than low-wage slavery. Weekend markets, local shops and street fairs are bustling across Asia. The old giants of merchandising are stumbling while nimble and creative new players are starting to push toward international markets. Creators rather than investment bankers are starting to set the pace of grassroots retail. The model has long existed in the manga field, once a realm of independent creators that became an innovative tech industry that slew Hollywood. Instead of moaning about what’s not on the box store shelves, figure ways to make alternate products in your garage or backyard - and then grow a business from that microcosm. Sweat equity is better known as the American Way.

This rising trend of independent production was detectable as far back as three decades ago - when one of my editorial jobs was with a Hong Kong fashion magazine. By now the era of haute couture is finished, whereas the trend of pop-up brands and arts-driven clothing has been quietly changing the fashion sense of young people worldwide. From pop-up sales venues to more stable mini-boutique malls, the direction of the post-fashion generation is clear - individual choice and often quite quirky. (BTW, my mother was the first Asian fashion model for Bullocks in Los Angeles back in the 1950s - she’s still alive and kicking while that retail scene is long gone.) The Trump admin’s new tariff regime is revolutionary in that it’s clearing out the dead wood, an essential first step for a new wave of consumer interest in affordable wearables.

Escape from American Reality

If you think the local Walmart is a no-frills shopping experience then you haven’t been to its bare-bones operations in China. As a shopping experience the Chinese version of a big-box is inside a multi-story emporium - a vast concrete box - negotiated along upwardly mobile escalators plowing past piles of housewares in cages and stacked boxes - and of course racks of frumpy clothes that should not be worn to weddings or funerals. During my long sojourn in China I’d suffer a routine Saturday morning ordeal of shopping aka restocking at Walmart for, let’s say. “patriotic reasons” – which involved the purchase of imported cans of Old Milwaukee beer (by Pabst) imprinted with artwork of pin-up girls reminiscent of a naive American sometime between the Korean War and Vietnam conflict era - well, actually my college days in the original Midwest Big Ten. That was in the pre-feminism era.

On Friday evenings before hitting bar row in Beijing or Nanjing, often over a dinner of crisp roasted duck purchased for next to nothing from an outdoor wood-fired “chef”, my American pals - white or Asian born in the USA - would invariably say: “Hey, this brew is not as rich as the local Harbin or Tsingtao beer - but the pin-up girl on the can is amazingly, uh, cool - why can’t women around here be as attractive and fun like that?” That’s the recurrent question I’d ask myself when mentally comparing the greedy ambition-driven modern woman with those sweet girls of way back then.

My response: “Quit your carping about American chicks. There’s no more mystique and definitely not a lot of fun and laughter, just hand over a credit card to get her out of your hair.” Rejoinder from a smart aleck Yank friend based in Hong Kong: “Yeah, you’re talking way back when, in grandma’s heyday - ancient history!” Well, to that repartee I plead guilty of nostalgia. “You’re absolutely right. I’m a three over - over the hill, overpaid and over here. Except not paid much at all!”

As host of the gathering and senior by decades my response was invariably: ”You pathetic batards, when was the last time you dated a female who’s carefree, cheerful, healthy and built va-va-boom? You guys have nothing but complaints and nasty comments about the USA! I guess that why you’re here and not back there: To meet some nerdy Chinese girl who’s willing to babysit you!” After a few beer-fueled slings and arrows from the fellows, I’d put on my jacket and announce: “I know some underground bars around here where you might meet some visiting teachers from America or sometimes Australia - female and friendly too.”

Well, not one marriage proposal came out of those late-night expeditions, mainly because those foreign entities became engrossed in conversation with someone not among the 1 billion-plus locals. Before long nostalgia for the USA set in and they drifted off on their lonesome paths. If they had been back in the States, they would’ve ignored each other. Nostalgia, folks, is a gift from a life in exile - with nobody around who shares your core interests and certainly none with any intention of spending the night, much less the remainder of a lifetime with an itinerant loser from America. After all, there’s a lot of lonely rich guys in Hong Kong and Singapore with tons of cash. Asia’s just a marketplace, after all - and half of that billion-member population in Asia are female aka consumers (not givers) – so dating and that dreaded concept called matrimony is just buying an expensive product devoid of love or even caring. Oh, what could that have to do with Walmart?

Walmart China

The same goes for Walmart box stores in China - something out of place, in hopeless disarray and suffering a binational identity. As for the midnight code of “find ‘em and forget ‘em”, that also applied to Walmart China - vast monotonous piles of nerd wear, archaic sporting goods, sanitizer spray and sox in plastic bags - with one major exception: The massive food floor. Unlike the neat American aisles of tasteless packaged food and frozen boxes, China Walmarts are bustling with shouting butchers whacking off the heads of geese and chickens. meat cleavers ripping through stone-cold pork and still flapping fish, piles of strange vegetation for unknown application in cuisine, rows of clear harsh Chinese white-lightning liquor distilled from sorghum, every sort of packaged food including frozen dumplings and dainty cookies from Europe, and of course noodle boxes for take-home slurping at the end of the day. The haranguing by enthusiastic butchers, this or that brand hawkers and argumentative crowds at the cash registers invariably gave me a splitting headache, relieved by exiting down escalators step-by-step since the power was never turned on exit ramps. On arrival you’re treated like a king and on the way down you’re just another tramp. Outside in the outdoors markets, Saturday noontime was sheer hell in the Forbidden Kingdom amid ever-growing crowds of excited shoppers around crowded tables of assorted electronics gear and piles of cheap clothes.

Although nowhere near as brutally guttural and harsh as the Cantonese dialect, hundreds of voices in Mandarin created a furious ear-splitting cacophony like one of those screeching patriotic concerts by a hundred zither and tooting horn performers ended with a wham-bam of clashing cymbals. Ah, the Walmart experience on Saturday in those forbidding cities! Those were the extremes I’d wade through just to obtain two six-packs of Old Milwaukee pin-up adorned brew to replenish my otherwise empty mini-fridge for the next weekend’s “Last Supper”. What was it about that pre-Hugh Hefner Playboy era image that tantalized - eased the pain and grief of my Freudian imagination? The near-impossible prospect of freedom. The cut-off jeans and wild reddish locks blowing in the wind - were iconic of an America during its Age of Innocence when freedom was taken for granted as a God given gift - and I was lucky indeed to grow up back then and go to college in the naïve state of Indiana. In that rural outpost, there were actually young women who were not conniving or narcissistic. However delusory and ephemeral, that memory of freedom from social fear was a breath of fresh air as compared with a self-protective world of today. Realizing that gap, I never tried to fit in but preferred the role of a friendly outsider at arms-length. Journalism was the perfect job for that.

Despite all the hoopla about Walmart being an American-origin purveyor, there was not a strong presence on the shelves of made-in-USA products in the Chinese offshoot. Sure, many of the brand labels were American, like Fruit of the Loom underwear but it was all manufactured locally. Something like 30,000 Chinese factories produce the majority of goods on sale at Walmart USA, or about 70 percent of labeled items. Most of those are ordered from and sent to Shenzhen for shipment to the States; that massive industrial zone being located just outside the Hong Kong border. The three main WM procurement and shipping hubs are located at the Yantian port district of Shenzhen, Shanghai and Ningbo on the north shore of the Yangtze River.

Due to massive urbanization over the past three decades, labor-intensive production has been steadily relocated to inland villages in the interior highlands (many in those remote villages have never seen a foreigner) or transferred under Chinese management to Vietnam, Cambodia and other parts of Southeast Asia. The more complicated goods are produced piecemeal as sub-parts and then assembled in Guangzhou (Canton) near Hong Kong. The diaspora into evermore remote Third World conditions (reminiscent of the Coppola movie “Apocalypse Now”) is largely due to intense cost-cutting pressure from Walmart USA. Cheapskate American consumers enjoy low prices thanks to cheap rural labor on the other side of the planet. Well, making a T-shirt is just one step up from “them old cotton-fields back home” of the pre-Civil days, eh? Actually piece-meal parts production of countryside farm folk is more cost-effective than overt slavery, shopping at Walmart is the next best thing to the plantation, right Scarlett? Why this social-economic disparity goes unnoticed by American consumers is that after materials, human labor and shipping fees are calculated, the price of, say, men’s underwear. earn a hefty profit for the Walmart organization (USA).

Perils of the Rag Trade

So my magazine editor would assign me to cover the annual fashion week in Hong Kong and another in Shanghai, where there’d be a lot of entertainment and a bit of champagne swilling, panicked models pretending to be super-cool, designers’ aides storming around to make last minute corrections with an wristband pin-cushion and media superstars in absurd low-cut gowns smiling to the adoring crowd. During those low points of my journalism career, I’d ask myself why in hell are you here? And the answer would ring through my addled brain - because there’s no big lucrative war starting up and you’re in desperate need of the money, stupid! My response was I’d rather be a sewer cleaner and that same honest voice would calmly say: “No you would not, you coward, because you much prefer the scent of pretty flowers!” Due to the rather flat-chestedness of the zombie Chinese models, I never even got the privilege of peeking into an unbuttoned gown, thankfully.

Then, at some point amid the festivities, some pushy intruder would rush into to tell a designer something familiar like: “The whole container is being held up at the port because our gowns are missing one button - and that is nonessential anyway.” (That actually happened - just one of many such untoward events in the fashion madhouse.) I wondered why some new-hire clerk at Walmart or Target could not sew on a nonessential button or just shrug if a customer asks. Thus the toiling producers bear all the headaches along with any added costs, thus further reducing the profitability of the rag trade. Insurance on these sorts of last-second disruptions is basically unheard of. While hell on seamstresses, fashion is the perfect milieu of drama queens and cheapskate buyers.

Risks of Business

When boarding a train from Shanghai or Hong Kong to Beijing, I often encountered an executive with a clothing manufacturing firm - at the lower end of the rag trade that supplies Walmart. The conversation was invariably centered on the manager’s confession of the hassles, flaws, losses and other tribulations of that glamor-feeding biz. The fact that the American fashion industry, Walmart included, often switches its inspectors on the ground results in all sorts of threats of order cancelation over micro-details that your average consumer would never detect or even imagine. As the factory owner rattled along, I’d usually order a Harbin beer from a cart-pushing attendant while listening to his diatribe about unfair practices in the trade versus a very tight profit margins. The return of cargo was, of course, like sticking a poison-tipped dagger into the rather small family business. Walmart, I took it, was not well liked but putting up with its inspectors was just one of those things. Why then, does the rag trade put up with WM? Because orders of thousands of garments do not transpire with any other merchandiser. One successful shipment can mean a respectable profit to offset all previous losses. And also there’s the prestige factor vis-à-vis your eager competitors. Sadly, a mega-order from WM translates a minute of fame for an otherwise obscure factory owner.

And so, the current crisis for Walmart’s easy-money shipments from Chinese manufacturers could well be a blessing in disguise for Chinese clothing producers who can switch to an easier and financial safer ordeal in the global market - or simply cash out and enjoy life at long last. One question that I asked nearly everyone in the rag trade that I encountered was: “Why are the Walton heirs so tight with money and tough on manufacturers?” My not-so informed response as the American on the spot went like: Rumor has it that they’re Jews – but they’re not – indeed they belong to the Presbyterian church that I once was part of. It’s all the fault of us tightwad Christians, you see.

The ‘Wumart’ Alternative

The main domestic competitor of Walmart in China is known as “Wumart” (can’t tell the difference from Wa-Mu? You are not the only one totally confused!) Its founder Zhang Wenjhou - a math wizard - got his start at superstore ownership in 1994 but got himself in trouble with tax authorities for untrustworthy financial accounts, a “crime” resolved after years of litigation in the courts. Unspoken in his troubles is whether President Bill Clinton (former governor of Arkansas) had a role in sabotaging the main big-store rival of Little Rock-based Walmart. If so, that would make a heck of a TV series - Wa vs. Wu kung-fu shootout in Beijing! More modest in terms of product lines than Walmart, Wumart currently has 1,000 stores (mainly grocery outlets plus) across China.

The deal of this century was forged in 2020 when Wumart paid for an 80 percent share in the Chinese operations of the METRO grocery chain, which is headquartered in Germany with backing from an Egyptian car-sales mogul. Next, Wumart partnered with Dmall, the provider of an electronic/online system for home delivery. The latter is necessary because Wumart stores are often located near wealthy communities without public transport access.

The relatively recent boost for the Wamu rival (METRO is pronounced “me-trow” somewhat like “me-too”) - basically puts Walmart China between a rock and a hard hit. Adding a headstone, it’s doubtful whether any Republicans - and also some of the more aware Democrats - are going to feel remorse about “the little store from Little Rock” of the Bill-and-Hillary era of corruption and political chicanery.

So, now at last, I can say: It is a big deal that Walmart is in dire trouble after its long run as a crony outfit of Bill and Hillary. That the lethal blow is now happening in China is ironic, considering it was Bill Clinton who personally ordered the murderous B-2 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Karma may come late in the game, but it still arrives on time. Obviously, none of the investment-driven Chinese players in this lethal game had any concept or notion of such “ghosts from the past” - but the last move in this horrific game is being played out in Asia, where necromancy and prophesy are alive and well.

This close to endgame for Walmart, there’s the bright side of opening a vast realm of commercial growth possibilities across the USA for start-ups, smaller players in the marketing sector and, hopefully, novel concepts in low-cost and healthy vital nutrition for American families. Meanwhile, I’ve just started going to faraway health-food shops to boost my stamina with natural vitamin soda to withstand the hellish heat and dust storms along a god-forsaken southern border - although I wouldn’t mind enjoying a Harbin beer with a roast duck. But instead it will be the same old tired tamales and a can of lukewarm cerveza. “Pa’arriba, pa’abajo, pa’dentro!” Glass up, down and swallow!”