Guns, drugs and breast milk: China's web shoppers exploit vacuum to buy illegal goods
Mainland online vendors find ways around keyword blocks in current legal vacuum, but planned revisions hope to stem illicit e-trade
From hard drugs to air guns and fresh breast milk, illegal and grey-market goods are easy to find on the mainland's most popular online shopping sites.
The trade flourishes in part because of a legal vacuum - the mainland does not have a law specifically governing e-commerce. Instead, a collection of guidelines loosely govern online transactions. But revisions are under way, according to one legal expert helping with the changes, and should stifle much of the internet's black market.
Shopping websites traditionally relied on technology to flag illegal transactions, but it was a cat-and-mouse game, as shady sellers responded with innovative work-arounds, said Zhang Yanlai, an e-commerce expert at the Brighteous Law Firm based in Hangzhou.
"Ten years ago, you might have got away with bluntly describing your item as 'heroin'. Then the hosting websites learned to screen the word. Then people used 'diacetylmorphine' or 'C21H23NO5', the chemical name. Websites learned that too," Zhang said.
"Now it is difficult to put anything obviously illegal out there, especially on established platforms like Taobao," Zhang said, referring to China's most popular online shopping website, owned by the Alibaba Group.
He said illegal goods sold online fell into three rough categories: prohibited items such as drugs and weapons, unlicensed goods such as tobacco and medicine, and counterfeit goods.
An Alibaba representative in Hong Kong said the company relied on "a number of methods including keyword screening, manual filtering and user reporting" to keep such contraband off their trading website. But a variety of illegal goods appear available on or via the website still.