In a three-part series launched on October 28, The Paper examined how Yiwu's foreign trade has risen against the tide: in the first half of 2026 the city's export value reached 420.7 billion yuan, breaking the 400-billion mark for the same period for the first time, with total import-export of 486.42 billion yuan, up 19.9% year on year.
The numbers rest on a market drawing 300,000 daily visitors and debuting more than 1,000 new products every day, with over 38,000 resident foreign merchants and more than 680,000 overseas buyers conducting cross-border trade on a recurring basis. In the first half, Yiwu's GDP reached 135.61 billion yuan, up 8.0%, the fastest among Zhejiang's 17 strongest counties and county-level cities.
Yiwu's goods now reach 233 countries and regions, and its highest single-market dependence — the Middle East — is only about 15%, meaning turbulence in any one market touches at most a sliver of its business. The city's express-parcel volume approached 14 billion pieces in 2025, first among Chinese counties, with an average of 26,000 parcels per minute shipped worldwide.
The report frames Yiwu's resilience as structural: a diversified global customer base, an agile supply network and continuous policy upgrading rather than dependence on any single trade route.
Source: The Paper
