Fines for fake goods a small price to pay for China's cheap counterfeits
With so many customers happy with knock-offs, rogue traders are bound to persist
Many consumers seem happy to buy fake, often substandard goods on the mainland, such as copies of designer-label handbags, even though they know they are illegal. Why buy a real Hermès handbag when you can get a fake one online at just 10 per cent the price of a real one?
Internet shopping is booming throughout the country, with Tmall, the business-to-customer platform of e-commerce giant Alibaba, reporting sales of more than 2 trillion yuan (HK$2.5 trillion) in goods last year, according to a recent consumer rights report.
Yet this boom has also led to a rise in unhappy customers.
Authorities in Hangzhou, where Alibaba is headquartered, received more than 22,000 complaints about products or services bought online last year, according to the report issued by municipal market supervision and consumer rights protection authorities. This was a 65 per cent increase in the number of complaints it received in 2013.
But the level of complaints still appears disproportionately low, considering that China's central commercial watchdogs reported late last year that 60 per cent of the goods sold by Taobao, Alibaba's flagship customer-to-customer shopping website, were fake.
Tian Lipu , former head of the State Intellectual Property Office, last week said on the sidelines of the annual parliamentary session in Beijing that mainlanders' poor awareness of intellectual property rights was the main reason fake or substandard goods were still rampant throughout the country.