There is a specific kind of credibility that comes from being the founder of China’s largest packaged drinking water company, China’s richest person, and someone whose business has grown to 52.55 billion yuan in annual revenue precisely through the distribution systems he is now criticising. Zhong Shanshan has all three kinds of credibility.
His appearance on CCTV Finance’s Dialogue program on Saturday was not an academic intervention. It was a major commercial figure describing, from direct experience, how the platform economy has changed the relationship between producers and markets.
“Traditional distributors operated under relatively transparent and predictable fee structures,” Zhong said. “Today, platforms determine transaction commissions through algorithms and decide which merchants receive traffic.”
That sentence is the most concise description of the merchant experience on major ecommerce platforms that anyone has offered publicly in a long time. The fee structure is algorithmic. The traffic is algorithmic. Neither is transparent in the way that a traditional wholesale margin or a fixed distribution fee is transparent. The merchant does not know exactly what they are paying for, they cannot predict it reliably, and they cannot negotiate it in any meaningful sense.
The Traditional Distributor as a Lost System of Accountability
The comparison to traditional distributors is the sharpest part of Zhong’s argument, and one that gets almost no attention in Western ecommerce coverage, which tends to treat the displacement of traditional distribution as an unambiguous efficiency improvement.
Traditional distributors, in China and everywhere else, operated under agreements with manufacturers and brands. Those agreements were negotiated. The margins were known. The services rendered were defined. A distributor who performed poorly or charged unfair rates could be replaced. The relationship was commercial but legible.
Platform algorithms are not legible in the same way. When Alibaba or JD.com’s system decides how much traffic to send to a particular merchant, or what commission rate applies to a particular category, or which listings surface in which searches, those decisions are made by systems that the merchant has no access to and limited ability to appeal. The merchant can see the outputs but not the logic.
Zhong argued that the shift has fundamentally altered the country’s retail ecosystem, placing mounting pressure on brick-and-mortar businesses and contributing to the decline of many city-based distributors. This is not a technophobic argument against digital commerce. It is a structural argument about accountability.
The Impulse Purchase Observation That Nobody Is Making
Zhong also argued that the rise of online shopping has changed consumer behaviour by reducing spontaneous purchases typically associated with physical retail. “People used to stroll through shopping districts, discover products they liked and make impulse purchases,” he said. “That kind of emotional and spontaneous consumption has largely disappeared.”
This observation connects directly to two pieces EcomWatch published this month. The Indian D2C brands choosing quick commerce as a launch platform because it recreates the impulse discovery moment in a digital environment. And the emotion-led advertising piece, where the argument is that brands are marketing to the wrong emotional register because they do not understand that impulse and belonging drive purchase decisions more than considered evaluation does.
Zhong is describing a loss of something genuine: the physical retail environment that creates serendipitous discovery, the product you did not know you wanted until you saw it in a shop window, the purchase that is an expression of mood rather than a response to a search query.
The Same Complaint, in a Different Country
Everything Zhong described on Chinese state television on Saturday has a direct equivalent in the US ecommerce merchant conversation that EcomWatch has been covering all month.
The Online Sellers’ Bill of Rights Act exists because US Amazon sellers have been making exactly the same complaint: platforms determine commissions through mechanisms that sellers cannot see, control traffic to listings through algorithmic systems that sellers cannot influence, and implement policy changes without meaningful notice or negotiation. The bill proposes mandatory explanation of enforcement decisions, caps on payment holds, and a private right of action precisely because the accountability structure of the platform relationship is broken in the same way Zhong describes.
Jason Yu, general manager at CTR Market Research, offered the standard balanced response: digital platforms can indeed become dominant intermediaries and contribute to aggressive price competition, but they also improve efficiency, reduce transaction costs, and provide market access for smaller businesses. The solution is not to eliminate platform power entirely, but to establish fair regulations that curb abusive practices while preserving innovation and accessibility.
That is a reasonable position. It is also, notably, the same position that every policy paper on platform regulation in the US and EU has arrived at. The debate about what “fair regulation” looks like and who gets to define “abusive practices” is where the actual work happens, and it is happening simultaneously in Washington, Brussels, Beijing, and apparently on CCTV Finance on a Saturday afternoon.
Our Take
The Richest Person in China Is Worried About the Same Thing That Amazon Sellers Are.
Zhong Shanshan’s platform critique is not going to change Chinese ecommerce regulation on its own. It is, however, a significant data point about where the debate is. When China’s richest person, appearing on state television, uses language that sounds like it was translated directly from a US Senate hearing on Amazon’s market power, the debate about platform intermediary power has achieved a kind of global convergence that is worth naming clearly.
The specific regulatory responses will differ: China is more likely to act through administrative pressure than through legislation, the US through antitrust and consumer protection statutes, the EU through the DMA. But the underlying diagnosis, that algorithmic platforms have replaced legible commercial relationships with opaque systems of control, is the same everywhere.
Zhong said it clearly: “I believe the power of platforms must be limited.” The question every market is wrestling with is limited how, by whom, and at what cost to the efficiency benefits that came with the power.
