When I read the news on the front page of yesterday's China Daily about the punishment of a company for sending massive amounts of junk mail, I thought my colleagues at the news desk must have made a mistake, for the fine was a mere 5,000 yuan (US$625). I thought it must be 10 or 100 times bigger.

That sum of money is almost nothing for a company that sends avalanches of messages to hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions, of spam victims for commercial purposes. I don't know how much profit the company has amassed from this mailing game, but I am sure it will not feel agonized in the least by the penalty, which is dwarfed by the cost it paid to send so many messages to so many recipients in the first place.

This kind of company usually obtains its victims' e-mail addresses or cell phone numbers by buying data from relevant sources or sending messages randomly through technical means. Either method incurs a high cost. So the business must be only too lucrative, given that more and more junk mails and messages are inundating our mailboxes and cell phone memories. According to statistics from August 2004 to April 2005, each of the 111 million Chinese Internet users received 16.8 junk mails a week.

Penalties for the violation of laws or public codes are usually light in this country. Take the Law on Food Safety. It rules that for "a severe case" of violating food safety regulations, the penalty will be "between 20 yuan (US$2.50) and 30,000 yuan (US$3,797)." A case involving loss of lives should be counted as "the most severe" that would incur the highest fine. However, would one life be worth merely 30,000 yuan? How large would the penalty be if several more lives are lost?

Public offences are also punished slightly. The highest fine for spitting is only 50 yuan (US$6.20).

In a mature market economy, the normal market order and social order are maintained through serious observation of laws, backed by due punishment for violations. Fines are usually very high in Western countries.

Take a few examples. In Australia, putting one's feet on a train seat could incur a fine of 100-500 Australian dollars (US$76-380); littering on the train, 200-1,000 Australian dollars (US$152-760).

In Italy, a customer who bought a bogus brand of sunglasses for 10 euro (US$13) was fined 3,000 euro (US$3,900).

Last month, the European Commission imposed a fine against Microsoft of 280.5 million euros (US$357 million) for the company's failure to comply with the commission's antitrust ruling. What is more, should Microsoft continue to fail to comply, an additional daily penalty could be as much as 3 million euro (US$3.9 million).

China is in the process of market development and wealth accumulation. The mentality of seeking quick profit has nurtured many market evils, such as fraudulence, bribery, unfair competition and even mafia-like cartels. If laws and penalties are not serious enough, there is no way to deter crimes and offences.

Light punishments have led to serious consequences, in environment pollution for instance. Many plants would rather accept punishment than install costly pollution-preventing facilities. For example, a paper mill with an annual capacity of 100,000 tons of paper will be fined no more than 1 million yuan (US$126,000) a year; this fine could save it several million yuan in the cost of pollution treatment.

Weak enforcement of laws usually stems from local governments' tolerance of local enterprises' illegal acts, which usually involve local interests. Many pollution-making plants are major contributors to local revenue.

Nevertheless, local authorities are not always lenient in punishing rule violators. For example, law enforcement officers are usually very harsh when they try to "sweep away" vendors from streets. This is because the move concerns the image of the city, which directly affects the local officials' "administrative performance."