Gov't to compete with Alibaba

The Chinese government has launched its own B2B website, China Suppliers – china.cn – which as far as I can tell is basically a state-owned version of Alibaba. According to Xinhua News, the site is run by the China Internet Information Center, a government news site. A quick comparison of China Suppliers and Alibaba seems to indicate that the government has learned much from the extremely successful private firm. The home pages as well as the sub-category pages are nearly identical. Under “Home appliances” the pages reveal the exact same list of items. See, for example, the right side column, which on both pages lists “Blender”, “Bread maker”, and “Coffee maker” under “Kitchen appliances”. The only difference here is that Alibaba lists for these items 395; 99; and 711 suppliers, respectively. The government lists zero for all of them. Guess they couldn’t reproduce everything…