China’s small exporters see bank accounts frozen amid ‘massive crackdown’ by police across the country

Traders are being told that they must travel to provinces hundreds or thousands of kilometres away to meet with investigators and unfreeze their bank accounts

The extent of the exporters’ losses is substantial enough that one city government set up an assistance centre to help those whose bank accounts had been frozen

Reading Time:3 minutes

Workers pack containers in Yiwu, an inland port home to dozens of warehouses, where many exporters have recently seen their bank accounts frozen for weeks or months – often by police located in other Chinese provinces. Photo: Ren Wei

Published: 7:30pm, 18 Dec 2020Updated: 11:26pm, 18 Dec 2020

Individual traders in some of China’s export hubs are having their bank accounts frozen in what industry insiders say is collateral damage from the nation’s crackdown on internet crimes and illegal foreign exchange transactions.

Traders in the cities of Guangzhou, Yiwu, Shenzhen and Quanzhou are among those whose bank accounts have been targeted.

They include the family of small manufacturer Betty Chen, who has been running garment factories and wholesale shops for decades in Guangzhou, focusing on export trade.

Chen is worried about her inventory of clothes – thousands of pieces that have gone unsold during the pandemic. Part of the reason is that the Chinese bank accounts of her African buyers have been frozen in the past couple of months.

Most of Chen’s African customers have been unable to visit China this year because of coronavirus restrictions. Thus, many of them have started sending African students studying in China to make purchases and transactions on their behalf in Yiwu and Guangzhou, where China’s traditional small and medium-sized export manufacturers are predominantly located.

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