Before the opening whistle of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Mexico City on Thursday, Yiwu has already made its move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this inland city, known as the “world’s supermarket” in east China’s Zhejiang Province, factories and traders have done their homework. They designed fan jerseys, filed patent applications, locked in production capacity and took orders for horns, flags and other football merchandise well in advance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To many outside China, Yiwu is known as the place where the world buys small goods. In 2025, the city’s foreign trade value hit 836.5 billion yuan (about 122.7 billion U.S. dollars), and its export value ranked first among Chinese county-level regions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet, to Chinese President Xi Jinping, who studied the city closely while working in Zhejiang, Yiwu has long carried a deeper meaning: a model of blazing a development path suited to local conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That meaning was underscored again in April, when Xi urged efforts to further review and apply Yiwu’s development experience. In an instruction, he said Yiwu’s small-commodities trade has carved out a massive market and grown into a major industry, forming a successful example of developing county-level economies in line with local conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yiwu had few obvious advantages in its early days. It is not coastal, not on a border and not blessed with rich natural resources. Its commercial life began with peddlers who traded sugar for chicken feathers for use as fertilizer, and with roadside stalls that slowly grew into a vast marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over several decades, this once obscure county-level city in central Zhejiang has built trade networks spanning more than 230 countries and regions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Xi visited Yiwu in late 2002 shortly after he became Zhejiang’s Party chief. It was the first county-level city he inspected while working in the province. In the course of the following three years, he made seven inspection trips there, gathered views on the city from officials at various levels, and came to see Yiwu’s experience as sound, credible and instructive for county-level and regional development across the province.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What drew his attention was not simply that Yiwu had become prosperous. It was the way it had done so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The city did not follow a ready-made formula, nor did it try to copy places with very different advantages. Instead, it built on what local people had long known how to do: conducting trade, building markets, connecting buyers and sellers, and responding quickly to shifting demand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2006, Xi hailed Yiwu’s rise, saying it had “turned stone into gold.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet, he was careful about how that experience should be understood. When a research report on Yiwu’s development was being prepared, Xi weighed the wording closely, moving from “Yiwu pattern” to “Yiwu experience” and finally to “Yiwu development experience.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The distinction was not merely semantic. A former colleague later recalled that Xi had insisted on “experience” rather than “pattern,” noting that a “pattern” could imply something fixed, while reform and innovation had no end point. It is in this sense that Yiwu matters beyond its trading floors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zhang Jiying, who owns an umbrella brand called Real Star in the Yiwu International Trade Market, started her business in 1997 with a stall of barely one square meter. Today, her customers span more than 170 countries and regions, and new products appear in her shop almost every week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After Yiwu launched digital tools, including the Chinagoods AI services platform in 2023, Zhang began using large language models to generate product videos in multiple languages, helping her reach more overseas buyers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stories like Zhang’s show the strength of a market that has grown from the ground up. But Yiwu’s rise also revealed the next test for governance: market energy could carry a city far, yet it still needed rules and services that could keep pace with its growth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By the mid-2000s, Yiwu was outgrowing its administrative framework. Its economy, market reach and international links had expanded far beyond those of an ordinary county-level city, while services regarding customs, inspection, foreign exchange, taxation and financing still lagged behind its needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Xi captured the mismatch with a vivid metaphor: a fast-growing child needed a larger piece of clothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2006, Zhejiang launched a reform initiative to expand Yiwu’s economic and social management mandate. In the years that followed, Yiwu took on a series of national pilot programs, including comprehensive reforms in international trade and free trade zone development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A landmark outcome has been the streamlining of export procedures for small commodities. As dozens of different goods are often put into a single container, customs clearance used to be complicated and a real headache. The streamlined procedure only takes a few clicks in several minutes, and the measure has been replicated in 39 markets across China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When Xi returned to the Yiwu International Trade Market in 2023 as China’s top leader, he revealed the essence of the “Yiwu development experience” — the ability to “create something out of nothing.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zhang Jiying’s shop was among those Xi had visited during his inspection tour, and she showed her umbrellas to him. Xi told Zhang and other shop owners that it was great for Yiwu to have made such achievements, and everyone was a participant, a builder, and a contributor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“His words gave all of us great encouragement,” Zhang recalled, adding that she would keep building her business around quality and innovation, selling better products to wider global markets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yiwu’s experience has gained renewed relevance as China looks to build stronger county-level economies with distinctive strengths, and the Communist Party of China requires all of its members to establish and practice a correct understanding of what it means to perform well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The World Cup jerseys, horns, and flags now leaving Yiwu are only the latest goods to carry the city’s name into the world. Behind them is a longer story of a place that has found what it can do best based on local conditions, while the government acts swiftly to create an enabling environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n