Zhong Shanshan, China's richest person who built his fortune selling bottled water, has recently appeared on state television again. This time, he traveled to Hengzhou in Guangxi to discuss jasmine flowers, agriculture, and supply chains. However, the conversation quickly shifted as he turned his ire toward e-commerce platforms—and his attacks were sharper than ever before.
In his view, these platforms are not neutral trading grounds but should be classified as middlemen. Unlike traditional intermediaries, which must purchase inventory, store goods, transport them, and assume stock risks, e-commerce platforms simply collect fees, control traffic, influence pricing, and then claim they are just a platform. This is akin to a referee on the field who not only blows the whistle but also places bets on the game.
During the interview, Zhong launched a full-scale assault on e-commerce platforms, leaving no room for doubt. He stated that platforms claim to eliminate middlemen but actually replace them with a technological guise. He argued that these platforms are "nail-on-the-head middlemen," as they set rules, charge transparent fees at fixed rates, and adjust prices on every single transaction. Zhong insisted that this behavior qualifies them as a special type of intermediary, and in fields like agriculture, making such profit margins is highly unfair. He charged that these middlemen have already killed off many urban retailers, destroying impulsive and emotional consumption that once thrived in physical stores. According to Zhong, this has reduced human activity, trapped young people on their phones, stifled creativity, and led to a loss of sensibility in society. He called for limitations on platform power, noting that small shop owners selling on platforms often cannot even determine their own profit margins.
Zhong's critique painted e-commerce platforms as responsible for harming farmers, merchants, the real economy, young people, and the nation's creativity. This is not the first time he has criticized e-commerce. Over the past two years, he has escalated from dismissing live-streaming sales to describing platforms as "economic meat grinders," and now to defining them as middlemen. In 2024, while in Ganzhou, Jiangxi, he declared he would never engage in live-streaming sales and looked down on entrepreneurs who do. He singled out low-price e-commerce, particularly platforms like Pinduoduo, for damaging China's brands and industries.
The root of Zhong's anger lies in the business model of NONGFU SPRING, which is fundamentally not based on low prices. The company sells not just water but also water sources, branding, advertising, distribution channels, packaging, and standards—most importantly, a carefully maintained pricing system. In the past, brands, distributors, and retailers jointly determined the value of a bottle of water. E-commerce platforms have disrupted this by allowing consumers to search for the cheapest option, collapsing pricing structures built over years with a single promotion. For NONGFU SPRING, which relies heavily on an extensive offline distribution network to reach millions of households, the greatest threat is not competition but loss of price control. The company invests heavily in television commercials and branding to justify its premium pricing, only to have platform anchors tell viewers to ignore the story and buy a cheaper alternative. A brand's carefully cultivated premium can be erased by a single coupon from a platform.
Zhong's discomfort is not necessarily with online sales themselves but with platforms gaining the power to influence pricing while masquerading as neutral tools. In a 2024 appearance on CCTV's "Dialogue" program, he discussed live-streaming agricultural aid. He argued that while a live stream might sell 10,000 pounds of oranges in a day, it could create a false sense of demand, leading farmers to overplant and eventually face a price collapse. For Zhong, live-streaming solves short-term sales problems but creates illusions of popularity. True agricultural industry requires stable production, standards, and channels. This reveals a fundamental difference in thinking between Zhong and internet platforms: platforms prioritize traffic, viral products, conversion rates, and GMV, while Zhong values water sources, tea gardens, orchards, factories, channels, and a supply chain that can last a decade. One focuses on today's sales, while the other worries about whether sales can continue next year.
Zhong believes that the logic of low prices is dangerous because platforms naturally favor transparency, whereas traditional brands thrive on opacity. Why can cola be sold for more than sugar water, or mineral water for more than tap water? It is because brands painstakingly convince consumers that their product is worth more. E-commerce platforms, through algorithms, reduce everything to a single table of price, volume, reviews, and conversion rates, culminating in the philosophy that the cheapest is right. If all businesses compete solely on price, there is no need for branding, research and development, or long-termism. This is why Zhong publicly criticized four major e-commerce platforms last year, calling them "meat grinders" of China's economy, arguing that they strip small and medium-sized merchants of fair competition and squeeze employment opportunities.
The greatest advantage of the platform economy is efficiency—it compresses layers of wholesalers, distributors, and retailers, allowing goods to reach consumers directly. While consumers benefit, there is no free lunch. Eliminating middlemen also eliminates the livelihoods of those dependent on them. A single platform, algorithm, and warehouse can replace a whole county's worth of distributors, wholesalers, and mom-and-pop shops. The question of who shares in the efficiency gains is what truly concerns Zhong. This is why he has redefined platforms as middlemen—more powerful ones. Traditional middlemen could only influence a region or a channel; e-commerce platforms can affect the entire country or even the world. They can also decide what consumers see, who gets top placement on the shelf, and adjust prices in real-time. This is the source of Zhong's growing frustration.
From a consumer perspective, low prices on platforms are not inherently wrong—consumers always want cheaper options, and platforms have created significant business efficiency. The issue is not whether e-commerce should exist, but whether platforms that have grown large enough to influence entire industries' prices, traffic, and survival should also bear responsibility commensurate with that power. Throughout Zhong's repeated criticisms, a consistent theme emerges: businesses should not only pursue profits but also consider what they are changing. When China's richest bottled water magnate steps forward to attack platforms, it signals a deeper problem. NONGFU SPRING sells a bottle of water; e-commerce platforms sell a set of rules. One decides what consumers drink; the other decides how that water is priced and sold. Zhong's real frustration may not be with e-commerce itself, but with platforms that act as both players and referees, even determining the size of the field and where the goal is placed, all while claiming to be neutral providers of space. This approach, he suggests, treats everyone like bottled water—transparent, colorless, and tasteless. When low price becomes the only competitive rule, Zhong fears that Chinese companies may end up with only one skill: making things cheaper and cheaper. This may be the fundamental reason why the bottled water tycoon is so bitterly critical of e-commerce platforms.
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