China struggles with logistics based smuggling

NANNING - China is struggling to combat illegal imports which smugglers conceal in mass freight as the country's logistics industry booms.

On Tuesday, police dumped a large batch of smuggled goods in a landfill in Nanning, capital of south China' s Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. Around 200 tons of items were destroyed, including frozen chicken and beef.

In the third quarter of this year, Nanning police have cracked a number of smuggling cases, featuring 2,700 kg of pork of questionable quality and 970 tons of other frozen goods.

In recent years, smugglers have turned to disguising banned goods in large cargoes, which have become much more common as the logistics industry expands.

China had 754 distribution parks in 2012, and the logistics industry is on the rise, partly thanks to a low access threshold.

In Guangxi's Dongxing city, which has a population of only about 100,000, there are 89 logistics companies legally in operation. Dongxing, which is under the jurisdiction of Guangxi' s Fangchenggang city, is located on the China-Vietnam border, adjacent to the Vietnamese city of Mong Cai.

Staff in the city's antismuggling office say that it is difficult to fully supervise these companies, and this means a risk of smuggling almost anything, from chemical compounds to frozen meat.

"They hide the contraband in seemingly normal mass freight, so it is hard to spot,"  said a staff member.

Gao Jianping, captain of the antidrug brigade with Dongxing' s public security bureau, said that earlier this year his team found a van loaded with 20 tons of smuggled frozen chicken feet produced in various places around the world. These kinds of products bring quite a risk to the Chinese market, as they do not go through any inspection or quarantine process and could contain a lot of bacteria. The driver seemed completely unaware of what he was transporting, and the boss of the logistics company did not know what was in the freight. The goods had not been checked when they were loaded, according to Gao.

Guangxi is not the only place in the country to have fallen victim to this kind of smuggling. In 2011, police in the southeastern province of Fujian found a large quantity of ephedrine among a cargo of old cotton. This led to the exposure of an illegal logistics chain that transported ephedrine from Vietnam to Fujian to make drugs.

"The consignor told the logistics company that what they sent was just cold medicine and the company never really checked it,"  local police in Fujian said.

In August last year, border police in Guangxi' s Pingxiang city confiscated 62 kg of drugs in a van supposedly used to transport dragon fruit.

In Guangdong and Shanghai, cases of smuggling via logistics have been reported from time to time, including illegal publications, drugs and various stolen goods.

One factor that has led to the rise in these crimes is that logistics companies mainly transport large cargos, a perfect hiding place for smuggled products, and they are very difficult for inspectors to check.

Some companies do not bother to check loaded goods, nor do they register the names of the consignors, said Mo Yunchao, deputy mayor of Dongxing.