Imagine a cluster of buildings the size of 100 football fields.

Now imagine more than 20,000 businesses inside, hawking their wares to another 200,000

potential customers.

This is the Canton Fair in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, the biggest trade show in the world.

If it's made in China, you can get it there.

Hair dryers, headphones, hard hats, tools, tractors, yarn, electric wires, everything.

And this is John Rewich, correspondent who covers China for NPR.

One booth we went to had this sound, and we went and checked it out,

and it's these electric, like they look like tennis rackets, they're electric bug zappers.

John has been to the canton fair numerous times over the decades he has covered China,

but this year, it was different.

I've sometimes had difficulty getting people

to open up, and this time everybody was willing to talk pretty much. It was mid-April, about a week

after President Trump's so-called Liberation Day, when he put tariffs on just about every country

on earth, with China receiving the highest tariffs by far. It was a seismic shock to many people at the

Canton Fair, including Stephen John, sales manager for a mini oven manufacturer.

And he told me at the time that 90% of his business comes from the U.S.

And so after the tariffs were jacked up to 145%, they shut down. They had an executive meeting

and then basically told all the workers, I think he said they have 100 workers or something like

that, to go home, their pay would be cut. And they moved into a wait-in-see mode.

That uncertainty would continue for about a month until earlier this week when the U.S.

and China reached

...