A stay-at-home mom in her 40s who moved from Shanghai to the U.K. in 2021, Xue recently built a 320-square-foot shed to store clothes, bags and small furniture from Chinese merchants, many of whom are eager to broaden beyond the American market. When orders come in she packs and ships the products, cutting the turnaround time. In a good month she earns £3,000 to £5,000.
Her family warehouse is a crucial part of a shadow logistic network that has powered China’s trade surplus past $1 trillion for the first time this year. Upstart cargo airlines are forging what they call a modern silk road, connecting factory hubs in China to population centers across Europe, where Chinese immigrants get paid to store goods in spare rooms.
The redirection of China’s export machine is one of the most dramatic examples of how President Trump’s trade war has rewired global commerce. China is outfoxing Trump’s efforts to isolate Beijing, with shipments to Europe and Southeast Asia more than offsetting the nearly 20% contraction to the U.S.
The European Union has this year topped the U.S. as the largest market for China’s $100 billion cheap package blitz for the first time, according to Chinese customs data.
“Europe is increasing, increasing, increasing,” said Bob Liu, 28, who flew to London in November to promote the plush slippers he manufactures in the southern Fujian province at a trade event.
The U.S. used to be 80% of his business, but has fallen to 50% this year. Europe’s share has soared to 40% from less than 2% last year. He’s designed a new line to appeal to Europeans, including oversize slippers that can be customized to look like a teal BMW or a red Ferrari.
“Europeans are more friendly to the Chinese now,” he said.
Exports of low-value packages to the U.S. have dropped more than 40% since the start of May, when Chinese packages worth less than $800 became subject to U.S. tariffs due to the closure of a customs loophole known as the de minimis rule.
In the EU, where packages under €150 are exempt from customs duties and in the U.K., where the threshold is £135, Chinese e-commerce is booming. Shipments have quadrupled to Hungary and Denmark and risen 50% or more to Germany, France and the U.K.
The switch hasn’t come without controversy. Online retailer Shein opened its first permanent boutique in a beloved Parisian department store in November, meant to be a crowning moment for the Chinese-founded company, now headquartered in Singapore. The launch instead devolved into chaos. France moved to suspend Shein’s online platform after finding child sex dolls and brass knuckles on its website. A court ruling is set for Dec. 19.
French prosecutors are investigating whether the Shein listing violated child pornography laws. Shein immediately took down the listing, which it blamed on an outside merchant, and suspended its entire third-party marketplace while it audits its internal controls.
The furor over the sex dolls appears to have galvanized the EU, which agreed last week to impose a €3 fee on imported small packages starting in July, before closing the de minimis entirely in 2028. Europe’s retail industry—which employs around 30 million people—needs protection, they argue, as do consumers and the environment. The U.K. plans to do the same, but not until 2029.
But stemming the tide could prove difficult. After years of stagnant economic growth, Europeans are enthusiastic buyers. New Chinese-run platforms like TikTok Shop and Joybuy are rolling out across Europe, with sprawling logistics networks to accelerate delivery.
Zoe Giles, a 34-year-old mother of two in Kent, England, gets an endorphin rush each time a package arrives from Shein or Temu. She orders on average 25 to 30 items each month: knickknacks, party supplies, gifts worth a few dollars each. Some are bad quality and have to be sent back, but she keeps buying.
“You’ve got to take the good with the bad,” she said. “It’s cheap and convenient. It has stuff that I can’t get elsewhere.”
A new Silk Road
President Trump’s trade war has scrambled the business models of Chinese e-commerce platforms. While companies like Temu and Shein have been growing in Europe for years, most were focused on the bigger, wealthier U.S. market.
Tariffs, which the Peterson Institute estimates now average 47.5% on Chinese imports, have eroded their main selling point in the U.S.: bargain prices. Chinese platforms immediately lifted prices to cover costs and slashed advertising budgets, according to Sensor Tower, a market-intelligence firm. Though ad spending is recovering, sales remain under pressure. Temu has seen seven straight months of double-digit U.S. sales declines, according to Consumer Edge, a firm that tracks credit and debit card transactions. Its sales have risen 56% in the EU and 46% in the U.K. since the start of May, compared with a year ago.
To shift to Europe, Chinese e-commerce flooded social media. Paid influencers across Europe have posted hundreds of videos of free pajama sets, hair dryers and coffee cups they’ve gotten on Temu free thanks to promotions.
The offers caught the eye of Karen James, a 62-year-old grandmother living in northeast England, a few months ago. James had mostly avoided the ultracheap Chinese e-commerce platform, preferring bricks-and-mortar stores. But the deal—10 free items if she spent more than £40—was irresistible.
“I thought, ‘well, that’s a no-brainer,’ ” she said. “They do entice you with those things.”
Flying those packages from China to Europe are entrepreneurs like 36-year-old Uzbekistani Abdulaziz Abdurakhmanov. His cargo airline, My Freighter, is a rising force on one of the world’s fastest-growing cargo routes.
This “new Silk Road” starts in China, runs through central Asia, and ends in Europe, mirroring the ancient Silk Road passages that traders carried silk and spices along for more than a thousand years ago.
Abdurakhmanov, who got his start as an airport check-in agent, launched the air cargo business in 2023. It now runs 200 flights monthly between China and Europe, hauling over 8,000 tons of mostly e-commerce packages bound for Europe, with Temu as one of its biggest customers.
“We are at our maximum capacity, Alhamdulillah,” said Abdurakhmanov, using the Arabic phrase for “praise be to God.”
Abdurakhmanov started his company from an office the size of a hotel room, and drove across China looking for clients. Now, from a five-story glass tower office in Tashkent, he is building a logistics conglomerate and plans to take it public, likely in London.
Securing landing spots at major European airports such as London’s Heathrow or Budapest Airport has become increasingly difficult and expensive.
Another cargo upstart, One Air, launched two years ago with one converted 32-year-old Boeing 747, initially flew into London, but has since relocated to East Midlands Airport, located in the English countryside outside of Derby.
“Temu, Shein, Alibaba—they are the biggest shippers in the world now,” said Peter Scholten, chief commercial officer of the aviation network One Air is part of. “You realize, wow, these guys are really ahead of us.”
East Midlands’ location is its attraction: It is in the center of England, yet has less traffic and fewer nighttime noise restrictions due to its relatively remote location. Sheep graze on nearby farmland, and tractors are a regular sight.
On a recent evening, One Air landed a Boeing 747 with 120 tons of mostly e-commerce packages from Ezhou, China. The freighter was quickly unloaded and flew back to China carrying only empty pallets.
The airport redrew its parking spaces for planes over the summer to make room for four more freighters, said Ioan Reed-Aspley, head of corporate affairs.
Another hub is a former military air base in Liège, Belgium. The airport has brought on Chinese-speaking staff and plans to demolish old military air hangars to make more freighter parking and warehouse space, according to Torsten Wefers, the airport’s vice president of sales and marketing.
Family warehouses
Chinese e-commerce companies have moved away from drop-shipping models, where goods are sent directly from Chinese factories and take weeks to arrive at a buyer’s door.
They are renting warehouses to store inventory so packages can be shipped faster. JD.com, the Chinese e-commerce company behind Joybuy, has leased around 530,000 square feet of space—equivalent to roughly nine football fields—in the British town of Milton Keynes this year, according to Knight Frank.
But other packages, especially those sold by smaller Chinese merchants, end up in shadow logistics networks, mostly run by Chinese immigrants on social media, known as overseas family warehouses.
For small packages lighter than one kilogram, or roughly 2.2 pounds, family warehouses typically charge as low as 70 cents a package, below commercial warehouses fees. They also are more flexible about storing goods like counterfeits.
Eva Lin, a stay-at-home mom in her mid-30s, runs one from a suburb of Paris. Originally from China’s eastern province of Zhejiang, she gets paid by Chinese sellers to store clothes, jewelry, and homewares that they plan to sell on e-commerce platforms in France.
Lin says she spends about four to five hours a day packaging orders and sending them off to customers. The work can be high pressure: If she doesn’t ship within a time window—usually 24 hours—her clients face fines.
As business grows, some Chinese immigrants in Europe have expanded beyond their homes.
Cao Ying, 38, runs a 1,000 square meter facility—roughly the size of two NBA basketball courts—in Wuppertal, outside of Düsseldorf, Germany. She can handle 1,000 packages a day but says competition is heating up.
Cao, who moved to Germany about a decade ago, worries Europe is becoming a dumping ground.
“Goodness, China has so many great things. Why aren’t those getting out there? Why is it always the shoddy, messy junk?” she said.
Shein’s move to establish a physical beachhead on the sixth floor of the BHV Marais department store—a centuries-old shopping location beloved by Parisians—sparked weeks of protests from retailers, politicians and department-store workers.
“We immediately went into the store and put everything in the cartons and we left,” said Guillaume Alcan, whose French shoe company Odaje sold its products in BHV Marais. He says Shein enjoys an unfair advantage by using the de minimis loophole to import their goods—and is bad for the environment to boot. “It is impossible for us to stay in a store with Shein one floor above us.”
Shein responded to a request for comment by saying it hasn’t changed its strategy in Europe. The company has said its competitive edge stems from its small-batch manufacturing model, not the customs loophole, and that it is working to reduce its environmental impact, including by using more recycled polyester and efficient packaging.
The controversy did little to deter buyers. On the day of Shein’s launch in Paris, customers lined up outside the store’s entrance to get in, far outnumbering protesters on the other side of the street who held up signs saying “Shame on Shein.”
Shein has also been accused of selling unsafe products.
Consumer groups across Europe joined forces this year to investigate more than 100 items sold on Shein and Temu—and found 70% weren’t compliant with EU regulations. Toys included choking hazards and toxic substances.
More than a dozen USB chargers overheated, including one that reached 216 degrees Fahrenheit, just above the boiling temperature of water. A necklace sold on Shein had 8,500 times the legal limit of cadmium, a toxic metal, they found.
Shein said it removed the products—all sold by third-party vendors on its platform—and commissioned its own tests, which showed a higher rate of compliance for some items. Temu cited a different report from consumer groups which showed three toys sold on its platforms did meet EU standards (three others didn’t). Both said in statements they remove noncompliant products from their platforms and work with independent labs to screen items.
But the concerns are also economic. Retailers warn competition is threatening their industry—one of the top private-sector employers in Europe—which has struggled with inflation and sluggish consumer spending since the pandemic.
“We sell at a price point of around 15 euros a pair of underwear, where Shein and other Chinese platforms will sell five pairs of underwear for the same price,” said Guillaume Gibault, founder of French underwear brand Le Slip. “It puts in the mind of the customer, the price doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
