China’s strict but messy gun laws now ensnare toy buyers
When the police swarmed into San Cheng’s apartment in Beijing late at night and accused him of illegally buying guns, he was sure it was a mix-up.
True, he had bought dozens of toy guns on Taobao, the Alibaba shopping site, as props for his business designing shootem-up games for smartphones. But the seemingly harmless replicas were so cheap and easily purchased, Cheng said, that he thought owning them could not be a crime.
He was wrong. Cheng, 47, a Taiwanese American game designer, ended up spending three years in detention and prison. In detention, he said, he met 20 or so other men who had also been arrested in a police sweep against buying replica guns online.
China has some of the world’s toughest weapons laws, including broad definitions of what counts as an illegal gun. But Cheng’s experience shows how wildly expansive the rules can be, potentially punishing people for buying toy or replica guns that are widely available online.
“They’re China’s biggest digital retailing platform,” Cheng said, referring to Taobao, in an interview from New Jersey, where he has been recovering after his release from a Chinese prison last year. “People just don’t understand that they’re illegal, because if you go on to Taobao and search for toy guns, you’ll get so many recommendations.”
Chinese authorities have mostly prosecuted the buyers of such items and, to a lesser extent, the sellers, according to a search of an online nationwide database of court judgments. But the online shopping platforms where these sales take place have rarely been targeted, and it is unclear how much legal responsibility companies like Alibaba have in such situations.
In Taobao’s terms of service, Alibaba warns shoppers that they are buying from third-party merchants, which means the company cannot possibly guarantee that each and every product is safe, high-quality and legal. Alibaba declined to comment.
Cheng and other campaigners have urged authorities to turn up the pressure on China’s online shopping sites rather than jail ill-informed buyers.
China’ s strong gun controls mean that fatal shootings are rare, and many citizens support the laws to keep it that way. But there has been a growing debate over the legal definition of a firearm. Experts say China’s regulations — which ban buying, selling or owning weapons above a very low threshold of force — are vague and hard for laypeople, even judges, to understand. The result, critics say, is that unsuspecting buyers of compressed-air and spring-powered toys are turned into criminals.
China’s gun control law of 1996 states that to be legally classified as a gun, a weapon has to be capable of killing someone or knocking them unconscious. But in 2010, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security imposed far stricter rules that in effect defined many toys as illegal guns.