Visitors to Taobao, the country’s biggest online shopping platform, on Wednesday were offered steep discounts on products like electric rice cookers (down from $42 to $25) and 85-inch televisions ($512 instead of $639).

Similar offers popped up from other major Chinese online shopping apps: The first thing buyers see is a section of goods “subsidized by the nation,” part of an effort to encourage people to upgrade old fridges, laptops and washing machines for discounted new models — mostly from Chinese brands.

The campaign, launched in January as part of a government swap program, has shifted into high gear since the trade war began.

“Let us join hands, bring together the wisdom and strength of ‘Made in China’ to light up the galaxy of the domestic market,” an alliance of 100 supermarkets said in a statement last week, joining a flurry of pledges from government ministries, cities and companies to find ways to offset the expected slump in American consumers.

Beijing is scrambling to respond to the shock of President Donald Trump’s triple-digit tariffs, now at a minimum of 145 percent. It has done that in part by maintaining a defiant public stance, including warning “those peasants in the U.S.” this week that the trade war would backfire and they would “wail in front of the 5,000 years of Chinese civilization.”

On Wednesday, China appointed a new chief trade negotiator, promoting Li Chenggang, a former envoy to the World Trade Organization, to replace Wang Shouwen, who took part in negotiations with the first Trump administration.

But Beijing is also taking steps to insulate its economy from tariffs on Chinese goods by rapidly expanding domestic markets to soak up the huge array of “Made in China” products that are now effectively blocked from being exported to the U.S.

Thanks to that effort, the domestic market for consumer goods grew rapidly in the first three months of the year. Sales of communication equipment including smartphones and household appliances grew by 27 percent and 19 percent, respectively, the National Bureau of Statistics said Wednesday.

That helped the economy expand by 5.4 percent in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, the bureau said.

It was also helped by a 6.9 percent surge in exports as international buyers rushed to get hold of Chinese-made products before Trump’s tariffs took effect. In March alone, China exported $306 billion in goods, up 13.5 percent from the same month last year.

But even with strong state support, exporters say, it won’t be easy to pivot. That’s partly because Americans spend more: Household consumption makes up nearly 70 percent of U.S. GDP compared with under 40 percent in China.

“We’re still unfamiliar with the domestic market, and that’s been a challenge,” said Stephen Wan, owner of Kaiyue Garment in Nanchang. Over 18 years in the business, Wan had done little to promote his apparel within China — until this past week.

Sixty percent of his orders had been from the U.S. — and only 10 percent from China. Now, Wan has begun posting videos on Douyin, the China-only version of TikTok, and has launched a store on JD.com, another online shopping giant.

Local governments have also stepped in to help by arranging loans and resolving production bottlenecks. “They’ve been keeping tabs on how many orders we’ve lost and have offered us advice and assistance,” Wan said.

Analysts expect more state support to be announced as the trade war drags on, noting that Beijing had previously focused its stimulus measures on local government debt, leaving space to ramp up support for households.

“The Trump threat has forced the Chinese government to speed up on raising domestic consumption,” said Keyu Jin, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics. “It has shown that China’s reliance on exports to stimulate growth is becoming less potent and actually quite risky.”

In previous efforts to turbocharge the economy, the government tended to focus on construction and manufacturing. It encouraged investment in factories, railways and skyscrapers. Now, policymakers are urgently trying to do something much harder: increase demand for Chinese-made goods within the country.

For the past two decades, China’s leaders have said they want to lessen the economy’s reliance on export-focused manufacturing and shift it toward more domestic engines of growth.

But their efforts to boost consumption have met with little success. Household spending has been especially weak since the pandemic.

But being cut off from the vast U.S. market might force Beijing to redouble its efforts to prevent widespread unemployment from factory closures.

“Tariffs have a way of forcing a reallocation of resources into exactly the areas which the Chinese government finds useful,” Jin said. “If anything, the Trump shock has really pushed everyone … to act in concert, which wasn’t necessarily the case in the last few years.”

Although the campaign to encourage purchases began earlier this year, it has intensified dramatically in recent days.

JD.com announced a $27 billion initiative to help exporters switch to domestic sales by buying up unsold goods and supporting companies to join the China-focused platform to tap its huge userbase and logistics network. Baidu, a leading search engine and artificial intelligence company, is offering free, AI-generated live-streaming advertising to sellers.

“China has a massive market of 1.4 billion people, with enormous consumption potential,” said Gao Changchun, head of the Shenzhen DHCB E-Commerce Research Institute, who has been urging the municipal government in Shenzhen to offer low-interest loans to businesses.

Ultimately, Gao says, policies encouraging domestic sales will make Chinese businesses more resilient. “The Chinese economy is like an ocean, not a small pond,” he said, quoting Chinese leader Xi Jinping. “Changes in the external environment may stir up some waves, but they will not alter the overall long-term positive trajectory of China’s economy.”

For much of 2024, international economists forecast that China would miss its growth target of “around 5 percent” — until a flurry of stimulus measures were announced late in the year. The government set the same ambitious goal in March for this year.

Even before the tariffs, economists were saying that target would be tough to hit, not least because a slump in the real estate market continues to be a major drag on growth. Investment in the sector decreased 10 percent in the first three months of 2025, while sales of commercial housing were down 3 percent.

Those deeper problems may undercut China’s strategy for blunting the impact of tariffs. Beijing appears to hope discounts will deliver a quick bump to retail sales but has not done the hard work needed to make people really feel confident to spend more of their income, analysts said.

The announcements fall well short of addressing the structural reforms needed, said Camille Boullenois, a Brussels-based analyst for Rhodium Group, a research firm.

The Chinese government appears unwilling to take the risk of costly — and politically tricky — structural changes to social security, bank lending and local government finances during the trade war, she said.

“The government sees itself in this grand competition with the United States where a lot is going to be decided in the short term, so they are willing to sacrifice the long-term health of the economy for that short-term competition,” Boullenois said.

Beijing has been here before.

In 2020, just as Trump’s first trade war with China reached an uneasy truce, Xi announced a concerted effort to stop relying so heavily on foreign buyers and instead boost domestic demand.

That self-sufficiency drive — known as “dual circulation” — was disrupted by the pandemic, high unemployment and a prolonged property slump. Many households were left worse off and unwilling to spend. Savings rates have soared as people squirrel away spare cash for the next rainy day.

Levels of concern have been especially high among the middle class in major cities, who were hit disproportionately hard by regulatory crackdowns on internet companies, after-school tutoring and the property sector.

But consumption remains stubbornly low, and prices keep falling, raising the prospect that China is entering a deflationary spiral.

The danger for Beijing is that factories keep producing far more than domestic buyers need — then they compete to cut prices in a bid to encourage purchases.

Prices remained low for the first three months of this year, with an official index that tracks everyday consumer items like groceries falling 0.1 percent compared with the same period last year.