Wine smuggling through Shenzhen has fallen about 50%, traders say

The informal wine route between Hong Kong and Shenzhen appears to be losing strength after years as a profitable path for moving imported bottles into mainland China, according to traders, public case records and a report published Wednesday by Vino Joy News.

A Shenzhen importer who specializes in classified-growth Bordeaux told the publication that wine smuggling has fallen by about 50% from pandemic-era levels. The importer spoke on condition of anonymity, and the figure is an estimate rather than an official customs statistic. No comparable public data on total smuggled wine volumes was provided. Still, the report said the decline reflects a broader change in a market once driven by a large tax gap, heavy cross-border traffic and strong demand for high-end French wine.

For years, Shenzhen was one of the main entry points for wine brought from duty-free Hong Kong into mainland China outside legal import channels. Hong Kong removed its wine duty in 2008. Mainland China still applies customs duty, consumption tax and value-added tax on ordinary imported wine. Under the most-favored-nation tariff regime, the combined tax burden is about 43%, according to the report. That gap created a strong incentive to move expensive bottles, especially Bordeaux, across the border without full declaration.

The trade was helped by the scale of movement between the two cities. Shenzhen’s checkpoints handled 273 million passenger crossings in 2025, or about 740,000 a day, according to the Shenzhen Municipal Port Office, as cited by Vino Joy. Mainland rules allow eligible travelers moving privately between the mainland and Hong Kong or Macao to bring in one bottle of alcoholic drink above 12% alcohol by volume duty-free if it does not exceed 0.75 liters.

That allowance helped support a method commonly described as “ant moving,” in which larger shipments were split into many small loads and carried by multiple people making repeated crossings. Traders and court records cited in the report described a system in which wine was stored in Hong Kong, carried in small quantities through Shenzhen checkpoints and then collected on the mainland for delivery to warehouses or customers.

Publicly disclosed enforcement cases suggest that activity has slowed from earlier levels, although they do not show that it has disappeared. Vino Joy reported that records for 2025 and 2026 show fewer wine-smuggling cases through Shenzhen than were seen more than a decade ago. In May 2012, Shenzhen Customs said it had uncovered more than 160 red-wine-smuggling cases and seized over 6,000 bottles in the first four and a half months of that year alone.

More recently, one administrative penalty case disclosed by Huanggang Customs in 2023 involved Shanghai Fushan Investment Co. and a smuggling scheme that allegedly moved overseas-purchased wine into mainland China between April and June of that year. According to the report, the wine was split into smaller loads and carried by parallel traders in personal luggage. Customs valued the wine at about RMB350,500 and said the operation had evaded about RMB105,600 in taxes.

People working in the trade told Vino Joy that stricter enforcement is now a major reason for the decline. Shen Zelin, general manager of Shenzhen Longyi Supply Chain Co., which transports wine and other goods through the city’s ports, said smuggling cases had “definitely declined” compared with the period before 2024. He also said fewer service providers remain willing to support the illegal trade.

Shen cautioned that the lack of public announcements does not mean smuggling has ended. Some cases may be too small to disclose, he said, while larger ones may still be under investigation. But he described an enforcement environment that has become more difficult for couriers and organizers. According to his account, repeated arrests can turn a customs offense into a criminal matter, and authorities are also targeting the people who organize the crossings and the owners of the goods.

Pan Liu, deputy general manager of Hong Feng Yuan Wines (Shenzhen) Trading Company, told the publication that enforcement against parallel traders is now “extremely strict.” He said travelers caught repeatedly can be blacklisted and may lose access to permits needed for travel between Hong Kong and the mainland. He also said the one-bottle allowance does not protect frequent border crossers who make repeated trips within a 15-day period, making them more likely to be flagged for inspection.

Pan said customs authorities now rely on large-scale data analysis and systematic screening. He described being subjected to a special inspection after returning from Vinexpo in Hong Kong with empty bottles, and said past records can still trigger attention years later. The report presented those comments as evidence that customs monitoring has become more precise and more persistent than in the years when the route was at its busiest.

Market conditions are also cutting into the trade. Several people interviewed by Vino Joy said falling demand for fine wine on the mainland has reduced the appeal of smuggling, especially for Bordeaux labels that were once popular in business entertainment and gift-giving. The anonymous Shenzhen importer said weak sales at the consumer level mean fewer traders want to hold large inventories, reducing the need to bring in wine outside regular channels.

Wu Xianghua, chief executive of Fine West and a longtime seller of classified-growth Bordeaux, told the publication that the social status once attached to those wines has weakened. He said that slower business spending, broader economic pressure, changing consumer tastes and an aging population have all reduced Bordeaux’s influence in the market. That decline, he said, has affected everything from top estates to lower-priced classified-growth labels that once attracted middle-market buyers.

Lower prices have made the smuggling route even less attractive. According to the report, some imported wines in mainland China are already selling below their landed cost, while cross-border e-commerce platforms are offering certain Bordeaux labels at steep discounts under a preferential tax regime. Pan said one classified-growth Bordeaux, Cantemerle, was recently selling through cross-border e-commerce for just over RMB170, a price he said made it difficult for gray-market bottles brought from Hong Kong to compete.

Storage and logistics costs in Hong Kong add to that pressure. Traders interviewed by Vino Joy said the old calculation no longer works as well: the tax gap still exists, but weaker demand, cheaper legal alternatives and a greater risk of detection have narrowed margins. One importer told the publication that some of the remaining activity has shifted away from Shenzhen toward Zhuhai and Guangxi, suggesting that smugglers may be looking for less exposed routes rather than leaving the business entirely.

Taken together, the changes point to a quieter border trade than the one that developed when Hong Kong’s zero-duty status met mainland China’s much higher import taxes and strong appetite for Bordeaux. The 50% decline cited by the anonymous importer cannot be independently verified from customs data, and the 273 million border crossings recorded in Shenzhen measure total passenger traffic, not wine movements. Even so, traders and public records cited by Vino Joy describe the same trend: a historic route for moving imported wine into mainland China is under pressure from weaker consumption, tighter controls and shrinking profits.