Illustration: Chen Xia/GT

Last Wednesday, my parents sent me a parcel by express delivery to my university campus in Shanghai. However, as express companies refuse to make deliveries to dorms, they instead require students to pick up packages at a public collection point. When I showed up a couple days later, an employee said someone had already fetched my package. He showed me a receipt with my name signed on it, only not in my handwriting. I insisted that I had not received it. The worker finally found my parcel - in a "signed-for" pile - explaining that they do this courtesy for customers unable to fetch parcels on the first day due to a policy of having to return unsigned packages to the sender within two days.

I understand that the company was just doing me a favor, but the confusing incident reminded me that, in November of 2015, China began a new regulation requiring real-name registration for all express delivery packages. To crack down on postal crimes and people mailing unsafe or illegal items, senders and receivers must now present their ID cards for verification. But apparently this policy is only nominally carried out and rarely enforced.

With the rapid development of Chinese e-commerce businesses in recent years, express delivery companies have seen explosive growth nationwide. According to the 2015 Statistical Bulletin of the Postal Industry issued by the State Post Bureau, 20 billion parcels were delivered across China in 2015, up 48 percent over the previous year. Nearly 276 billion yuan ($41.90 billion) in revenue was generated by express companies in 2015, up 35 percent year-on-year.

Where just a few years ago we only saw green China Post trucks on the road, streets in big cities like Shanghai are now zipping with scooters belonging to any number of private delivery companies. All day long in the Jing'an office tower where I intern for the Global Times, uniformed delivery boys come and go on the elevators, darting in and out of offices to drop off or pick up packages. One of our GT reporters is obsessed with shopping on Taobao; every day a delivery boy arrives at her desk with a new box or three.

The convenience that express delivery has brought, quite literally, to the people of China, especially in rural regions, is undeniable. But due to their gross lack of regulation, the sector also now serves as something akin to a personal courier service for criminals. Drug dealers and arms traffickers previously had to make cross-country trips in cars carrying their contraband; now they just call "kuaidi" to come pick it up for them for 20 yuan, with absolutely no threat of being caught.

According to numerous media investigations into this popular yet shady industry, most express delivery companies don't bother checking customers' identification because they consider it inconvenient and time-wasting. Delivery boys only get paid per parcel, which means that the more time they spend on a single delivery, the less money they will earn for the day. Many customers also don't want to show their IDs to delivery boys, most whom are migrants and seen as untrustworthy (some use their job to case out residential apartments for robbery), which also puts pressure on express services who don't want to lose customers or market-share.

What's more, there is no punishment for express companies who fail to abide by the regulation. It's just yet another empty law on the central government's books. An analysis released by the Legal Evening News found that the fundamental reason behind the poor feasibility of this regulation is the lack of technical support that would guarantee the privacy of a sender or recipient. Cases of fraud and threats made by unscrupulous people who illicitly obtain courier data are quite common, leading to a general mistrust of the express industry despite the public's growing reliance on it.

Sadly, this conundrum demonstrates the lack of innovation and ideas in China's technology sector. How is it that no delivery company has invented an encrypted ID recognition scanner that can both meet the requirements of the law and also satisfy the privacy of senders and recipients? The QR (Quick Response) code payment for Alipay, for example, protects customers' information by uploading their data directly to a public security system and automatically deleting all data afterward. Perhaps it's time for Jack Ma to invest in his own fleet of express delivery boys.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Global Times.