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Whether you are gift-wrapping a toy car or hanging Christmas ornaments, there is a strong chance you are handling products made in a Chinese factory.
The day after President Donald Trump spoke in an interview about his tariff policies that girls in the United States do not need to “have 30 dolls”, some political commentators discussed China’s influence over the US toy market. The US currently has a 145 percent tariff on goods from China.
“China makes 80 percent of all toys sold in this country and 90 percent of all Christmas goods sold in this country,” former New York Times columnist Charles Blow said during a May 5 appearance on CNN’s News Night with Abby Phillip. “We have a lot of leverage with China. The Christmas and the doll industry is not one of them.”
Blow told PolitiFact his source was an April 29 report in The New York Times. It said, “Factories in China produce nearly 80 percent of all toys and 90 percent of Christmas goods sold in America.”
Data shows those figures are rounded up, but not far off.
Blow’s statement is “directionally accurate but slightly overstated on toys”, said Gilberto Garcia-Vazquez, chief economist at Datawheel, which operates an online economic data platform called the Observatory of Economic Complexity.
He said out of $41bn worth of imports in toys, games and sports equipment in 2024 by the US, $30bn, or about 73 percent, was manufactured in China.
“If you include domestic production – small but non-negligible – China likely supplies closer to 72 percent of toys actually sold in the US, not 80 percent,” Garcia-Vazquez said. The Observatory of Economic Complexity uses data sources from “statistical offices, open data portals or custom union websites”.
Claire Huber, spokesperson for the US International Trade Commission (USITC), provided PolitiFact with an analysis of 2024 data that showed 78.3 percent of toy imports and 85 percent of Christmas-related imports, such as lights, trees and decorations, are manufactured in China. The toy category includes dolls, wheeled toys and scale models.
The data was compiled using the USITC’s DataWeb, which cites statistics published by the US Department of Commerce’s Census Bureau, accessed on May 9.
Garcia-Vazquez also analysed 2024 data for Christmas goods and said 90 percent of US imports in that category came from China.
He said Christmas lights are an exception because “Cambodia has recently overtaken China as the top source”.
The New York Times published an April 27 report that showed 76 percent of “toys and puzzles” and 87 percent of “Christmas decorations” come from China. Bloomberg, citing the trade organisation Toy Association, said “roughly 80 percent of toys sold in the US are made in China”.
