One evening in the Maldives, I spent a few hours talking with local entrepreneurs. I expected to hear about tourism, politics, or the economy. Instead, they kept talking about Temu.
Not artificial intelligence. Not semiconductors. Not even TikTok. Temu.
The Chinese shopping app has become so popular in the Maldives, they told me, that it has changed how people buy everyday goods.
Last year, the Bank of Maldives imposed a 30% surcharge on purchases from a group of popular international e-commerce platforms, including China’s Temu, Shein, Alibaba, and AliExpress, as well as U.S.-based eBay. The bank argued that online shopping, which accounted for 75% of foreign purchases made by its customers at the time, was worsening the country’s foreign-currency shortage.
Temu was so popular in the country that local media called this surcharge a “Temu tax.”
What happened next was even more revealing.
Consumers kept buying. Even after the surcharge, Temu remained cheaper than stores in the capital, Malé. The app’s free shipping had become so popular that the national postal service struggled to process the volume of incoming packages, the entrepreneurs told me.
Part of what made this surprising to me is that I live in India, just a two-hour flight from the Maldives, where Chinese apps have been banned for national security reasons since the 2020 border clashes between the two countries. It is easy to forget how pervasive Chinese consumer platforms have become elsewhere.
In the Maldives, I kept encountering a different form of Chinese power: consumer dependence.
What I heard in the Maldives made me wonder whether we are misunderstanding China’s growing influence in technology. In the West, discussions about Chinese technology are dominated by AI and semiconductors. But in the Maldives, I kept encountering a different form of Chinese power: consumer dependence.
Consumer habits can be consequential.
When people begin buying everyday goods through the same platform, they also become dependent on the logistics networks, payment systems, recommendation algorithms, and supplier ecosystems behind it. Over time, those systems become infrastructure. They shape what products people discover, which merchants survive, and where profits flow.
For years, Americans exported the world’s most influential consumer internet products. Search came from Google. Social networking came from Facebook. Online shopping came from Amazon. Now, Chinese companies may be training the world to shop online.
The more I thought about the Maldives, the more it seemed like an early glimpse of a broader shift. The country’s dependence on imports makes it an extreme example, but not necessarily an isolated one.
Governments around the world have spent the past two years trying to protect their local businesses from the onslaught of Chinese e-commerce. Indonesia restricted TikTok Shop. Vietnam has increased scrutiny of imported goods sold through foreign platforms. European regulators have raised concerns about customs exemptions, product safety, and the flood of ultra-cheap imports entering the continent through Temu and Shein.
These debates often frame Chinese e-commerce as a retail story. I increasingly suspect it is a power story.
The platforms people use every day shape trust, expectations, and behavior. Once consumers become accustomed to buying through Chinese marketplaces, the leap to using other Chinese digital products — like DeepSeek’s AI bots or Unitree’s humanoid robots — may become much smaller.
So, the future of China’s technological influence may begin with a cheap plastic package arriving at your doorstep.
