BACK in September 2021, Amazon banned 600 Chinese e-commerce shops for review fraud (making fake product reviews to boost their popularity on the search engine).
That event was not a one-time deal, however. From what I’ve heard, Amazon is continuing to do this, and some believe (including myself) that this isn’t about fake reviews.
China and the US is in the process of decoupling. It began with Donald Trump’s trade tariffs, but it has, to my surprise, continued to the next administration. Ecommerce, financials and semiconductors are the most obvious examples now and, assuming it continues, those may lead to other industries decoupling as well.
One of that best examples of Chinese-US ties is the retail/online retail industry. The US provides the consumers. China provides the producers. However, Amazon’s banning of Chinese sellers is something new, and if I had to guess, was motivated by people above. After all, fake reviews are nothing new, and Amazon looked the other way (in the past) because it was a source of revenue.
So what changed?
The reason is partly political. US companies had worked with their Chinese partners for years, and although it’s true that the cost of offshoring to China has changed, the US-China political situation has become tense as well. Both the US and China are concerned about sensitive data passing to the other as well as security concerns of one sort or another. There are also geopolitical issues over Taiwan, and of course global influence.
Power trumps money, and the American-Chinese relationship over the past few decades was ultimately about money. The People’s Republic of China has always resented America, and America (or a certain portion of America) distrusted the Chinese, but both can look past their respective qualms because of financial incentives.
Those incentives are now receding, and so they are decoupling./PN
