By stacking subsidies from the trade-in scheme with a platform discount, the 25-year-old corporate marketing employee could have snagged it for under 7,000 yuan, nearly half off.
It would have been her fifth purchase under the programme. But when she tried to confirm the purchase the next day, the deal had vanished. Subsidies for that category had been suspended in Guangzhou, though still available in neighbouring Shenzhen.
Rather than give up, Huang improvised. “The price was just too tempting,” she told CNA.
Instead, Huang redirected the laptop delivery to Shenzhen North High-Speed Rail Station. There, she met the courier, let him snap photos of the unboxing – a requirement for the rebate – and squatted by the platform to inspect the device.
“It was a bit of a hassle, and I had to pay for the train,” she told CNA. “But with a discount like that, it was absolutely worth the detour.” Her ticket cost around 80 yuan.
Huang isn’t alone in finding creative ways around the rules. On Chinese social media, users have been swapping tips on how to tap trade-in subsidies across provincial borders.
A Shenzhen resident, who declined to be named, told CNA he recently bought a 13-inch MacBook Air in his hometown of Shanxi and had his family mail it to him.
“It only cost around a few dozen yuan to ship,” he said, adding that he saved 20 per cent off the list price of 7,399 yuan – paying just 5,399 yuan.
But beyond workarounds, the recent subsidy suspensions have also spotlighted alleged misuse of the trade-in programme, particularly in the automobile sector.
Scroll through a Chinese secondhand car platform, and it’s easy to find thousands of listings for vehicles with barely any mileage – often just 100km to 300km on the odometer.
Dubbed “zero-mileage used cars” or “ling gong li er shou che” in Chinese, these listings have raised concerns that dealers are exploiting a loophole in the national trade-in scheme.
The playbook: buy new cars from automakers, register them under the names of relatives or employees to qualify for subsidies and sales bonuses, then resell them as secondhand – all without the vehicles ever hitting the road.
In May, Great Wall Motor chairman Wei Jianjun publicly called out the practice, estimating that “at least 3,000 to 4,000 vendors” are involved.
But industry experts told CNA the phenomenon is far from new.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/china-consumption-trade-programme-suspensions-frustrations-5202686
