Should e-commerce be stopped?
Liu Qiangdong
E-commerce has gone through 20 years since eBay was established on September 4, 1995 and began to enter the Chinese market, and in this booming 20 years, many successful e-commerce companies have been born, such as JD.com established in 1998, Alibaba Group established in 1999, Taobao established in 2003, Tmall launched in 2012, and up-and-coming Pinduoduo in 2015. At the time of the vigorous development of e-commerce, many excellent e-commerce platforms have sprung up in the domestic market, all of them have contributed their own strength to the prosperity of e-commerce, and they have also brilliantly reflected their own era values when the prosperous e-commerce market. These excellent e-commerce platforms not only promote the online prosperity of the market economy, but also convey the relevant concepts of e-commerce to the vast number of young people, making online shopping popular and gradually becoming an indispensable part of life.
Pinduoduo
More than 20 years of development, the prosperity of e-commerce is enough to be reflected in a series of sonorous figures: we take the data in 2022 as an example, the scale of online retail transactions exceeded 13 trillion yuan, the scale of users was about 845 million, and the transaction scale of the domestic online retail market reached 137853 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.89%. Let's take Alibaba's data as an example, "Alibaba Full Ecological Employment System and Employment Quality Research Report" estimates, taking the data of 2019 as an example, Alibaba's economic ecology in 2019 contains a total of 69.01 million jobs, of which new infrastructure creates more than 10 million jobs, the booming digital economy has become a new engine of employment in China, new formats give birth to new occupations, and new technologies bring new increments. Among them, Shanghai's core e-commerce business led to 2.227 million direct employment, and on the May Day Shopping Festival alone, the amount of "chopping" money of Shanghai consumers on Taobao Tmall increased by 1.7 times year-on-year. In the first five days of May, the business scale brought by Taobao Tmall to Shanghai merchants has reached more than 10 billion, and Shanghai Taobao anchors have started broadcasting more than 10,000 times.
Pinduoduo
Seeing the above data is not stunned, people marvel at the great results brought by e-commerce, whether in promoting economic development or stabilizing employment, e-commerce has played a huge role, as a huge social carrier, the entity everyone is applauding e-commerce, as if e-commerce has been the lifeblood of the national economy, but in fact? According to relevant data, the proportion of e-commerce in global GDP is expected to reach 14.5% in 2023, and the annual transaction volume will reach 30 trillion US dollars. In other words, the economic model of e-commerce does not account for a large proportion of the overall economic scale, but after the barbaric expansion of e-commerce, the social problems caused by e-commerce have indeed emerged one after another, and now it has become a stubborn disease. Let's take a look at a set of data: according to relevant statistics, in the first half of 2022, a total of 460,000 physical stores closed and 3.1 million industrial and commercial enterprises were cancelled. As of July, 40,000 enterprises in the country closed every day, mainly small and micro enterprises and private enterprises, and the root cause of the bankruptcy of these physical stores and small and micro enterprises came from e-commerce.
Online shopping
The reason why e-commerce can quickly become bigger and stronger in a short period of time is not unrelated to the tax reduction policy, as Liu Qiangdong said: "You are anywhere in the country, even if it is in the township you only need to open the shutter door, firecrackers are released, flower baskets are placed, the industrial and commercial tax all come that afternoon, they will tell you, this door face a month 2,000 yuan fixed tax, I don't care how much business you do, you do more to earn more, anyway, you pay at least 2,000 yuan a month in tax, the urban management comes to pay the urban management fee, The health station came to pay the garbage removal freight, the individual association came, must set an individual association report, a dozen Yamen all came to collect money, to the Internet there will be none, industrial and commercial taxes are all gone, so the state does not collect taxes on online small sellers actually caused great injustice, so that those who open physical stores and online stores can not compete", that is to say, e-commerce does not collect taxes is actually a huge injustice to physical stores, although it promotes the development of e-commerce, but sacrifices physical stores, Because there is no preferential policy support for physical stores in the face of e-commerce does not collect taxes are basically helpless, as for the so-called e-commerce to drive employment, that is even more impossible to talk about, Liu Qiangdong also said such a paragraph, he said: "Why e-commerce did not create an employment for the country, is to the country caused unemployment, a large number of unemployment, very simple truth, advanced productivity is to improve efficiency, advanced productivity brings always unemployment, from 1949 to today, China's textile industry production efficiency has increased by 60 times, During the period of 49~56 years, half of China's workers came from the textile industry, today's textile industry in China is not even 1%, productivity has been greatly improved, are automated, do not need so many people, someone suddenly ran over one day, tell you that we are a great company, I invented a very great business model, I am an Internet textile enterprise, I re-bring the employment of textile workers to the country, do you say this truth is tenable, so advanced business models must bring unemployment, So what is the essence of employment caused by e-commerce, the essence is that a group of young people who have gone to college and know the Internet have dug up the jobs of those who do not understand the Internet and people with lower cultural quality, and one person has dug up three jobs", that is to say, although e-commerce has driven employment on the surface, but the ensuing cost is often several times the large-scale unemployment of industrial personnel in traditional industries than in the field of e-commerce, so such employment should not be done.
Ma
A good market economy ecology should be like this: we call the process of commodity trading such as the Yangtze River into the sea, the traditional economic model allows people in various industries to have money, just like the ecology along the Yangtze River, a thriving state, but after the emergence of e-commerce, the Yangtze River disappeared, the only thing that exists is that the ice springs in the source of the Yangtze River are directly transported to the estuary by manual intervention, so that a good ecological model has disappeared, and the beautiful scenery of the Three Gorges, Dongting Lake, we are familiar with the Three Gorges, Dongting Lake, The scenery of Poyang Lake will no longer exist. Under the new e-commerce model, on the surface, manufacturers directly send goods to consumers, middlemen are saved, and in the short term, the big guys are benefited. But the development model of e-commerce determines that wealth must inevitably gather to a small number of people, when wealth is highly concentrated, there will be a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises, source factories bankruptcy and bankruptcy, and a large number of people who make a living will be unemployed, when the overall purchasing power declines, money can not circulate, the economic situation deteriorates, salary cuts and layoffs are also normalized, when everyone has no money, what is the meaning of the three melons and two dates saved by online shopping on weekdays?
JD
The barbaric expansion of e-commerce often emphasizes absolute low prices, especially low-price platforms such as Pinduoduo, when everyone one-sidedly emphasizes low prices, everyone will not think of putting time and energy costs on product research and development, but blindly reducing costs and vicious competition, which is very detrimental to the iterative upgrading of products and not conducive to social progress; At the same time, most of the tens of millions of merchants such as Taobao and Pinduoduo are still individual stores, and there is no substantive license information, once there is a consumer dispute, consumers are easy to suffer, once these unlicensed personal stores run away, the majority of consumers often have difficulty in protecting their rights; There is also the problem of false prosperity of e-commerce, false transactions consume a lot of social public resources, a series of civil and criminal problems caused by false transactions have seriously disrupted the normal judicial order and aggravated social unrest, presumably everyone often receives leaflets from grassroots law enforcement agencies, and the spearhead of many incidents is directly pointed to the problem of false prosperity of e-commerce.
Alibaba
Nowadays, the problems brought about by e-commerce have surfaced, showing a trend of tail failure, if not intervened and corrected in time, it will inevitably cause greater social problems. Just like the Alipay incident. Alipay has evolved into a 14 trillion financial behemoth, e-commerce is also a promoter, among which the problem of illegal lending and high leverage has been criticized, but fortunately, the historical intervention of regulatory authorities has isolated its products and borrowed brands, and delayed the listing process of Alipay to stabilize the financial order.
Ma
Therefore, it is imperative to control e-commerce.