Chinese Police Announce Crackdown on “Internet Black Markets”

via China Digital Times

China’s internet is a rough-and-tumble place, and that’s something the government has struggled to deal with both politically and commercially. Web shoppers here know all too well that things on the net often aren’t what they seem, and even the savviest shoppers are likely to get fleeced from time to time if they don’t stick to a small group of relatively trustworthy sites.

Today, Public Security Bureau authorities (i.e., the police) told Xinhua that in light of this, the police will be undertaking a specialized operation to clean up the “internet black market” starting in February of 2012. According to the Xinhua article, here’s a list of things the police will be trying to remove completely from the shady world of ecommerce:

• Guns
• Bullets
• Explosives

They will also be attempting to strictly control and supervise the sale of objects like these (in practice most of these will be effectively banned too, as it’s hard to imagine who could be permitted to trade some of them):

• Cutting objects (i.e., swords, knives)
• Poisonous chemicals
• Crossbows
• Mobile phone wiretapping software
• Car obstruction devices (not sure what that means)
• ID cards
• Bank cards
• Fake IDs
• Counterfeit money
• Fake reciepts
• Personal information
• Human organs

The crackdown will also — of course — be seeking to eliminate “illegal information that seriously harms national stability” (often a code phrase for politically sensitive content), illegal websites, groups, and just basically cleaning up everything about the internet, it seems like. This will help “build a stable and peaceful social environment.”

The crackdown will also include investigations into the supervision policies of major and smaller e-commerce portals, news portals, BBS forums, etc.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take this announcement, as the police announce “crackdowns” at fairly regular intervals on a variety of social problems. But given the increasing importance of the internet in China’s political and economic spheres, we have a feeling this could be a tad more serious.

So criminals, if you’re looking to buy guns or human organs or poison or whatever, best get it done before Spring Festival 2012. And for the rest of you, if you want to report the creep in the apartment nextdoor who keeps ordering “car obstruction devices” online, you can do that via this official police website.

[Xinhua via Sina Tech]