WeChat and AliExpress are among the “42 online marketplaces and 35 physical marketplaces allegedly engaging in significant trademark counterfeiting or copyright piracy“listed by US authorities in 2021.
Chinese companies hoped the Biden administration would be more lenient than Donald Trump. If the current tenant of the White House is not as virulent as his predecessor, who violently attacked Chinese flagships such as Huawei and TikTok, he has not relaxed the grip on companies. technologies of the Middle Kingdom. It’s even quite the opposite.
WeChat, a Chinese “super-app” published by Tencent which has more than a billion users, and AliExpress, the marketplace of e-commerce giant Alibaba, can attest to this. Indeed, the two platforms have been placed on the American blacklist of “well-known markets” to sell or facilitate the sale of counterfeit products. They are among the “42 online marketplaces and 35 physical marketplaces allegedly engaging in significant trademark counterfeiting or copyright piracy“, listed by US authorities over the past year.
As a reminder, WeChat was one of the Chinese platforms in the crosshairs of Donald Trump, who considered that the application represented a threat to “national security” of the United States because of the obligation for Chinese companies to respond to Beijing’s requests on the data. A complaint had even been filed in California in January 2021 against Tencent, whose application was accused of censorship and surveillance The plaintiffs notably alleged that WeChat shares its users’ data with the Chinese authorities and serves as a base for Tencent”to improve its censorship and surveillance algorithms“. However, a positive point for the Chinese application, Joe Biden revoked last year the decrees intended to ban WeChat, as well as TikTok, in the United States.
“China is the main country of origin of the counterfeit products seized” in the USA
WeChat and AliExpress join Chinese companies that had already been blacklisted in recent years, such as Alibaba’s Taobao, one of China’s largest e-commerce platforms, Baidu Wangpan, DHGate and Pinduoduo. . If being on this blacklist does not lead to financial penalties, it does harm the reputation of the sites and countries that are highlighted there.
“China is the top country of origin for counterfeit goods seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection“, said the services of Katherine Tai, the United States Trade Representative, in the 50-page report presenting this blacklist of markets selling counterfeits. The document also indicates that China produces “the greatest number of goods made with forced labor, including state-orchestrated forced laborand child labor.