Yes, China makes about 80% of toys sold in the U.S.
Whether you’re gift-wrapping a toy car, or hanging Christmas ornaments, there’s a strong chance you’re handling products made in a Chinese factory.
The day after President Donald Trump said during an interview about his tariff policies that girls in the U.S. don’t need to “have 30 dolls,” some political commentators discussed China’s influence over the U.S. toy market. The U.S. currently has a 145% tariff on goods from China.
“China makes 80% of all toys sold in this country and 90% of all Christmas goods sold in this country,” former New York Times columnist Charles Blow said during a May 5 appearance on CNN’s “NewsNight 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.
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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 the United States’ $41 billion imports in toys, games and sports equipment in 2024, $30 billion, or about 73.3%, was manufactured in China.
“If you include domestic production — small but non-negligible — China likely supplies closer to 72% of toys actually sold in the U.S., not 80%,” 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 U.S. International Trade Commission, provided PolitiFact with an analysis of 2024 data that showed 78.3% of toy imports and 85% 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 commission’s DataWeb, which cites data published by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Census Bureau, accessed May 9.
Garcia-Vazquez also analyzed 2024 data for Christmas goods and said 90% of U.S. 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% of “toys and puzzles” and 87% of “Christmas decorations” come from China. Bloomberg, citing the trade organization Toy Association, said “roughly 80% of toys sold in the U.S. are made in China.”
Data show 73% to 78% of toy imports and 85% to 90% of Christmas-related imports in 2024 came from China, supporting Blow’s point that the vast majority of these goods come from China. We rate his statement True.
