China Watch Blog

China Watch Blog has learnt that Shanghai will support construction of large e-commerce platforms similar to Taobao.com in a bid to create a national e-business model and accelerate the city’s growth into a global trading center.

Sha Hailin, chairman of the Shanghai Commerce Commission, said yesterday the government will encourage the development of big online platforms for transactions. But unlike Taobao, which has become China’s most popular consumer shopping website, Shanghai’s strength is in business-to-business online platforms.

The city will soon establish a website to serve cross-border trade as well as domestic deals, and will accelerate the construction of online platforms to trade commodities.

Last year, online retail shoppers in Shanghai spent more than 34 billion yuan (US$5.3 billion), or 5.72 percent of the city’s total retail sales, making it the top online shopping market in the country.

China Watch Blog has learnt that Chinese authorities have suspended nine online shops in a crack down on copyright infringement and counterfeiting, said the Ministry of Commerce (MOC).

The China Daily reported that a joint investigation team, organized by the MOC and the State Administration for Industry & Commerce, went to Guangdong and Shandong provinces to investigate the cases, according to a statement on the ministry’s website.

The statement said the suspended shops, registered on large online sales websites such as Taobao.com and Eachnet.com, sold a wide range of fake products, including garments, mobile phones and watches, at very low prices.

The police seized more than 12,800 items of copied commodities, including Armani, Burberry, Timberland, Levi’s, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Nokia.

Relevant departments will further clamp down on trademark violations and strengthen supervision over online shopping in order to create a sound online shopping environment, said the statement.

China Watch Blog has learnt that some famous sex board games are said to be selling well on the country’s popular e-commerce platform, Taobao.com.

A Shanghai Daily report says that the games, priced at 20 yuan (US$3) to 50 yuan each, are usually card games where players draw cards and follow whatever the instructions say.

Some cards require players to take off their clothes in front of the other players, while others may instruct the players to indulge in intimate actions with their friends, such as kissing and touching body parts.

Although the cards are mostly just pictures with cartoon figures, which can not be defined as pornography, the pictures and words on the cards often suggest activities such as premarital sex, one night stands, the use of drugs and even committing crimes.

Some local board game cafes are even offering private rooms which allow teenagers to play the sex games in -private, according to the Youth Daily.

The newspaper said some cafe owners in Zhabei District had seen young girls taking off their clothes in front of the others, but they hadn’t stopped them for fear of losing customers.

Local police told the newspaper that the sex board games could not be banned under the offence of spreading pornographic contents until the city’s cultural law enforcement teams defined them as pornographic games.

So meantime, vendors selling these adult games at Taobao.com will continue to reap good profits until, at some point, legislation is passed to put a stop to this business. However by that time, these sex board games may soon make it to digital mode and soon everyone using mobile phones and ipads will be able to access them.

China Watch Blog has learnt that Taobao.com, a Chinese-language website for online auctions and shopping founded by Alibaba Group, reported nearly 200 million registered members and more than 200 billion yuan in annual turnover, creating at least 1 million online sales related jobs.

As China’s inflation data remains high, the E-market will attract more price-conscious customers from the country’s 450 million Internet users and has yet to deliver more growth potential.

But the opportunity also brings a huge challenge to China’s logistics sector, one of the largest barriers to e-commerce.

Chinese customers have long been grumbling about the delays and patchy quality in the delivery sector because the logistics companies.

To ease the bottleneck, Alibaba Group, China’s e-commerce giant, unveiled its plan on Jan 19 to invest 20 billion to 30 billion yuan in the first step to set up a network of warehouses nationwide.

China’s electronics-oriented B2C site, 360buy.com and the garment site Vancl.com, also stepped up efforts to construct warehouses in major cities.

“We hope 10 years from now, anyone placing an online order can receive their goods within eight hours,” Ma Yun, chairman and chief executive of Alibaba, said.