China’s economy is rapidly declining, with weak consumption and serious internal turmoil in various industries. Recently, the Beijing Restaurant Association has initiated a “boycott internal turmoil” campaign, urging businesses not to engage in price-dumping below cost to exclude competitors or monopolize the market.
On August 5th, the Beijing Restaurant Association issued a proposal stating that “internally-turbulent” malicious competition severely disrupts the market order of fair competition, harms consumers’ legitimate rights, squeezes the reasonable profit space of enterprises, erodes the foundation of the industry’s sustainable development, and hinders the overall economy’s quality improvement and efficiency enhancement.
The proposal outlined principles such as refraining from engaging in price-dumping below cost to exclude competitors or monopolize the market, ensuring downstream businesses and suppliers are not subjected to unfair subsidy burdens due to market dominance, avoiding coercive participation in involuntary price wars through methods like biased algorithms or “downgrading” in search results, resisting monopolistic behaviors such as “choose one out of two” or exclusive partnerships that exclude or restrict competition, avoiding misleading consumers through tactics like falsely inflating original prices or deceptive promotions, and not using tactics like “free orders” or “purchase for 0 yuan” to bundle sales and conceal unreasonable extra charges.
In response, netizens raised criticisms such as, “Shouldn’t we first talk about how to ensure the hygiene and safety supervision of restaurants in the area?”, “Given the existing surplus, isn’t there already an issue of oversaturation? No one is patronizing even with discounts, let alone with price hikes”, “If it’s cheap, no one buys it; if it’s not cheap, someone buys it?”, “Addressing ‘internal turmoil competition’ is not something an association can achieve. Such proposals are nothing more than symbolic gestures.”
Some netizens also expressed opinions like, “The fundamental reason for internal turmoil is the e-commerce platforms’ focus on price, which leads to all similar enterprises engaging in low-level price wars along the same dimension, resulting in production conformity, waste, and inability to break away from the cycle of internal turmoil because e-commerce monopolizes sales channels”, “Support restricting the disorderly expansion of platforms and implementing measures against price dominance to ensure necessary supporting service facilities in residential areas!”