VietNamNet Bridge - Vietnamese enterprises place manufacturing orders with Chinese, import Chinese-made products, label them as Vietnamese products,and sell them in the domestic market.


Chinese goods have been squeezing into every corner of the Vietnamese market, from urban to rural areas. These include products with ‘made in China’ labels and ones sold under the cloak of Vietnamese products.

Chinese can counterfeit all kinds of Vietnamese products, from toothpicks, clothes to farm produce.

Vu Vinh Phu, chair of the Hanoi Supermarket Association, noted that Vietnamese consumers prefer Vietnamese goods to Chinese, so importers cheat consumers by selling Chinese goods, which have low selling prices. Vietnamese goods can go for better prices.

In mid-2015, Da Lat City released a strange decision on prohibiting the sale of Chinese potatoes at the city’s wholesale farm produce market. 

Chinese goods have been squeezing into every corner of the Vietnamese market, from urban to rural areas.

The decision was released after local authorities discovered that Chinese potatoes were sold as Da Lat potatoes.

As a result, though Vietnamese boycotted Chinese potatoes for the fear of toxicity, still had to consume Chinese potatoes.

Phu warned that by swindling consumers, Vietnamese importers and small merchants can make fat profits. However, they will kill domestic production.

When asked why Chinese goods can be labeled as Vietnamese goods, an official who asked to be anonymous said state management agencies must bear responsibility for this.

“Chinese manufacturers cannot put made in Vietnam labels on their products when exporting products to Vietnam,” he said. “The trade fraud must be committed by Vietnamese importers and merchants. Meanwhile, Vietnamese management agencies and market control task forces cannot prevent trade fraud.”

“State management agencies have loosened their management, thus paving the way for Chinese goods to penetrate deeply into the domestic market under the mask of Vietnamese goods,” he said.

He went on to say that Vietnamese businesses come to China and order Chinese manufacturers to make products in accordance with their requests, then import the products to Vietnam to sell as Vietnamese goods to earn big money from the price gap between Vietnamese and Chinese goods.

Counterfeit goods are mostly consumer goods which target low-income earners.

Meanwhile, Phu thinks the problem lies in the fact that Vietnam opens the border gate too widely, while state management agencies cannot control imports well.

He also thinks that it is a mistake for management agencies to focus on inspecting retail shops to find trade fraud, and that it would be better to tighten the control at the border gates.

To prevent trade fraud, the official believes there are two measures. First, Vietnam needs to create technical barriers to prevent low quality products. Second, better control over cross-border trade is needed.

Dat Viet