Recently I saw an article about e-commerce by retired scholar Wang Xiangdong, but I really can't agree with it. I specifically wrote an article that refuted scholar Wang's views. I am not a scholar or an expert, I am just an ordinary person.
Wang Xiangdong’s personal profile:
According to public information, Wang Xiangdong is former director of the Information Research Center of the Academy of Social Sciences and a director of the China Poverty Alleviation Foundation. The areas of focus are rural e-commerce, e-commerce poverty alleviation, and rural revitalization. I have no understanding of Scholar Wang before, nor have any intention of attacking Scholar Wang. However, in his discussion of e-commerce, I feel that Scholar Wang has insufficient understanding of the harm of e-commerce, so I specially issued a special article to refute it.
is the screenshot of Wang's article on e-commerce support. is published on August 7, 2022 at 19:52. The Sina blog was published in 2013. However, as a scholar, I am now carrying the previous articles to represent my views:
Wang Xiangdong's article
is my views on the current e-commerce trend and my rebuttal to Wang Xueshu.
1. The data cited by scholar Wang is based on the data from 2012, which is not the actual data at all.
According to the data published by China Business Intelligence Network , in 2021, my country's online sales scale reached 13 trillion. Therefore, scholar Wang did not conduct actual analysis based on the current situation, but used data from 10 years ago to analyze the current e-commerce trend. As a scholar, being able to have such imperfect data retrieval is contrary to the rigorous academic research attitude that scholars should have.
Data source China Business Intelligence Network
In 2021, the total retail sales of consumer goods in China was 44 trillion yuan. In addition to automobile consumption, there were 39.7 trillion yuan, and the annual catering consumption was 4.69 trillion yuan. After deducting catering consumption, there were 35.01 trillion yuan.
The actual proportion of online consumption in 2021 is 37.13% (this proportion has not been excluded, including beauty and hairdressing, medical and health, etc.)
2. Scholar Wang’s view is that many people choose online sales because these people make a living by this. If the state imposes taxes on them, it will increase unemployment.
through Qichacha query. In 2021, there were 5.71 million e-commerce enterprises in my country,
Qichacha data
0 data that can be found. As of April 2021, the size of small and micro enterprises in my country was 44 million and the number of individual industrial and commercial households was 95 million. Even if these small and micro enterprises and individual industrial and commercial households are excluded from 10 million of them, they are operating entities and operate e-commerce. Then there are 129 million households in total. Which is more important and more important is
? It is clear at a glance. Therefore, "small and micro enterprises and individual industrial and commercial households have become the main force in employment in my country." The Prime Minister said, "We must further support small and micro enterprises and individual industrial and commercial households to alleviate difficulties and develop."
May I ask scholar Wang, if e-commerce merchants rely on the Internet to make a living, if taxes are imposed, they will lose their vitality. Then, aren't these offline 129 million physical merchants relying on their own enterprises and small physical stores to make a living? Why can't e-commerce merchants be taxed and make them lose their livelihood? And can the vast majority of people who rely on entities to make a living aside, regardless of their life or death?
3. Scholar Wang said that the gross profit of orders for those small online merchants is very low, less than 10%. If tax is imposed, it will be fishing in the dry pond.
I really can't agree with scholar Wang's high theory.
From the current reality, it is precisely because we have not imposed taxes on e-commerce for a long time that e-commerce can take advantage of the platform's advantages in the national market and dump products into the national market at low prices. The snowball is getting bigger and bigger, while physical business is getting harder and harder. After three years of catalytic acceleration of the epidemic, the current large-scale bankruptcy and losses of physical businesses.
Why can physical businesses be taxed, but e-commerce cannot be taxed?
If e-commerce taxes, isn’t it more convenient and fast? All flows are supported by data links.Isn’t it easy to directly increase taxes according to the turnover? I don’t believe that if e-commerce taxes, it is like fishing in a dry pond, can e-commerce not raise prices? Will e-commerce merchants not balance their gross profit margins by themselves? Is the price after tax increases the same as before taxation? Is that so stupid to think of e-commerce merchants?
4. Scholar Wang said that big online merchants are paying taxes. It is a rumor that e-commerce has no taxes.
His argument supports that large online merchants are large in scale and it is impossible not to pay taxes. So big e-commerce companies are paying taxes.
Yes, big e-commerce companies are paying taxes, so why are e-commerce companies represented by Viya fined more than 1.3 billion? This is just a penalty tax. So, what is the corresponding retail sales?
What is even more difficult to understand is that scholar Wang said that in the current market environment, e-commerce has the motivation to pay taxes actively. I think Scholar Wang is very naive and imagines human nature too beautiful.
Whether it is an e-commerce company or a physical company, how many people pay taxes voluntarily from the bottom of their hearts and feel that paying taxes are glorious? They are all thinking about how to avoid taxes and how to pay less taxes. This is a common phenomenon and this is human nature.
Scholar Wang’s argument is not worth refuting.
My opinion:
1. I only saw millions of online merchants online, why didn’t I see hundreds of millions of physical business workers?
As a scholar, go out and take a look at the current situation of other cities that benefit from e-commerce. Without investigation, there is no say.
When money is continuously flowing to several e-commerce concentrated cities, most of the other funds are in net outflow, causing the local economic cycle to be setback and thus leading to an increase in unemployment rate.
As a scholar, you should be aware of these simple economic logic!
2. The unlimited proliferation of e-commerce affects not only physical business, but also the overall economic system that affects .
Whether it is harm to upstream production enterprises, exploitation and harm to the catering industry and travel service industry, and then to the real estate industry, it is systematic.
business is related to all systems and the impact is also the entire system.
3. As the three pillars that drive economic growth: investment, exports, and consumption, only foreign trade is operating normally.
At present, our exports are not only not problematic, but are continuing to grow significantly, indicating that there are problems in our own internal circulation. If you study in depth, you will find that the root cause of this kind of business environment where e-commerce is rampant is the serious imbalance in the distribution of wealth circulation caused by this business model without strict management.
When everyone feels that the consumer market is sluggish, where does investment come from? Therefore, we can only rely on the country to drive investment. However, it takes a long process for the state to transmit investment to social cells. Moreover, this is only an emergency measure that treats the symptoms but not the root cause.
The key is that private investment is definitely closely related to the overall market environment. Private investment is not active and consumption is sluggish. How can the economy get better?
4. Our economy will not be better without breaking the platform monopoly.
Take the home appliance market as an example. Whether it is online or offline , has been monopolized by the three major platforms of JD , Tmall and Suning Retail Cloud.
does physical home appliance business in its own city, and does not cooperate with these three major platforms, and the possibility of not losing money is basically zero. In other words, these three platforms have monopolized the home appliance market and turned themselves into the largest agent.
As a producer, there is no way to do so. Not cooperating with them means losing the market. If you cooperate with them, you must accept the other party’s strong bargaining power and reduce your profit margin. I know a boss of a first-tier brand. When chatting with him, he said helplessly that he had to cooperate with them even if he lost money, otherwise he would not be able to see the sun in the future.The boss of a domestic first-tier brand is so helpless. So how can we cultivate emerging companies and emerging brands?
Over the years, how many brands have we grown up with our own brands? Very rare! If a company has no profit, how can it have the funds to cultivate its own brand? The final outcome is probably all for the platform's OEM manufacturers.
As consumers, do you directly feel that the current product quality has improved or has it reversed?
And who are eliminated by these three platforms? It is the original dealer system of various brands. Aren't you going to get rid of the middlemen? As a result, he became the largest dealer. Didn’t you mean a bad-hearted landlord? As a result, he became a bad-hearted landlord. Why doesn’t scholar Wang mention that the amount of unemployment they cause is huge? Look at the current employment situation! How to make the economy better? There is no other way, only tax, tax, and tax on e-commerce platforms and e-commerce companies!
suggests setting a separate anti-dumping duty for e-commerce : because e-commerce is targeted to the national market through the platform. Make one dollar for one thing, and you can make money through the advantage of huge sales. This is the act of nakedly dumping the local market at a low price.
For the entire society, the result is that the entire entity's business is sluggish, shrinking, bankruptcy and unemployment. Isn’t this the current reality?
balances online and offline, forms fair competition, and produces the best business economic ecosystem, so that the cake can be made bigger and richer, and only then can it be achieved. Otherwise, everything is empty talk. is because business is a node that connects all industries. If there is a problem with this node, the entire system will have problems.
It is precisely because ten years ago that these incumbents advocated that e-commerce could not be taxed, artificially creating an unfair business competition environment, which led to the current situation.
is currently relying solely on e-commerce, and the cake can only get smaller and smaller! When has it been, I am still posting a notice that e-commerce cannot increase taxes. It is really unhealthy!
is just a different viewpoint, but I still want to wish scholar Wang a happy and healthy life in his later years!
voices from China, welcome to follow, forward, and hear different voices to avoid more pitfalls.
