Legislation: Call for e-commerce tax

BEIJING - China's top legislature should quickly enact the taxation of e-commerce, as an increasing number of buyers and sellers are relying on business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) websites to buy and sell goods, a political advisor said here Tuesday.

Zhu Yilong, member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), China's top political advisory body, made the proposal during the ongoing CPPCC session.

"Online shopping has become one of the mainstream commerce models in China, but few stores on B2C and C2C websites are registered or report their incomes to the taxation departments," Zhu said. "We must fill the taxation vacuum."

According to his proposals, the National People's Congress (NPC), the country's top legislature, should move to regulate the e-commerce industry, mandate the registration of online stores and require the payment of taxes.

If the proposed legislation on e-commerce is enacted, China is expected to further boost its revenue from the booming online sales among the country's 384 million Internet users.

Thousands of websites are hosting e-commerce in China, where spending on online shopping reached more than 250 billion yuan (37 billion dollars) in 2009, about 80 percent of which was carried out through Taobao.com, China's fast-growing e-commerce hub.