A contentious public debate has erupted in the Dominican Republic, pitting the nation’s leading merchant association against community leaders over calls for increased regulatory scrutiny of Chinese-owned business operations, with competing claims of unfair competition and rising xenophobia taking center stage.
The Dominican Federation of Merchants (FDC) has publicly urged the country’s top tax and customs agencies to ramp up oversight of Chinese-owned commercial establishments, arguing that widespread noncompliance with fiscal rules has created an unlevel playing field that threatens formal domestic merchants. FDC President Iván de Jesús García laid out the organization’s demands during a business conference hosted by the National Union of Businessmen (UNE), where the head of the General Directorate of Internal Revenue (DGII), Pedro Porfirio Urrutia, was in attendance.
García noted that FDC has flagged its concerns about this issue as far back as 2018, when the organization first began documenting apparent regulatory gaps. Current FDC estimates place the total number of Chinese-owned stores operating across the country at more than 1,000. According to García, these businesses collectively generate massive annual revenue, but many fail to adhere to the same tax and regulatory obligations that formal, established Dominican merchants are required to follow.
The FDC’s core grievances center on two key issues: widespread alleged tax evasion and mismatched import valuation. García estimates that uncollected tax revenue from noncompliant Chinese-owned businesses could top 80 billion Dominican pesos annually, a figure he acknowledges is drawn from broader industry projections. Beyond tax evasion, García says many Chinese importers deliberately declare imported goods at far lower values than Dominican merchants report for comparable products, artificially cutting their import costs and giving them an unfair price advantage in local markets.
The organization has also flagged gaps in electronic invoicing compliance. García pointed out that all formal domestic merchants have already invested heavily in the digital invoicing systems mandated by Dominican tax authorities, but many Chinese-owned businesses continue to operate without implementing these required fiscal control tools.
Adding up total commercial activity across all Chinese-owned stores, García estimates the group generates more than 1 billion Dominican pesos in daily sales, leading him to question whether their official tax contributions align with the scale of their actual business activity.
The FDC president has called on both the DGII and the General Directorate of Customs (DGA) to expand routine inspections and conduct systematic verifications to ensure all businesses meet their tax and customs obligations, regardless of ownership.
For FDC, the cost of unaddressed unfair competition has already been devastating for traditional Dominican commercial districts. García cited the iconic Duarte Avenue commercial area as a stark example: where the organization once counted 91 member businesses in the neighborhood, only seven remain today. García attributes the collapse of 84 local merchant operations at least in part to unfair competition from unregulated Chinese-owned stores.
Similar trends have played out across other major urban centers, García said. In the country’s second-largest city Santiago, long-standing family businesses owned by Dominican, Arab and Turkish entrepreneurs have been pushed out of prime commercial real estate, including the city’s historic downtown. In the town of Moca, one local shopkeeper association shrank from 33 member businesses to just five in the span of a few years. If the wave of closures continues, García warned, the country could see massive losses of formal private-sector employment, making urgent government intervention critical to stabilize local commerce.
But the FDC’s calls for broad targeted oversight have sparked significant pushback from leaders of the Dominican Chinese community, who warn that blanket criticism of Chinese-owned businesses risks fueling dangerous xenophobic sentiment. Rosa Ng Báez, president of the Flor para Todos Foundation, has denounced what she describes as an “unfortunate campaign” of generalized criticism targeting the entire Chinese business community.
In an interview with the morning news program Despierta con CDN, Ng Báez expressed deep concern that criticism aimed at a small subset of noncompliant businesses is being expanded to paint all Chinese-owned operations as unethical, creating harmful stigma that could incite discrimination. She pushed back against media framing and headlines that frame the debate as a conflict between Dominican merchants and Chinese-owned businesses broadly, rather than a targeted discussion of individual regulatory noncompliance.
“It makes me very sad and worried,” Ng Báez said, stressing that it is critical to draw a clear line between legitimate regulatory concerns about specific bad actors and unfair generalizations that tar an entire immigrant and ethnic community.
FDC leaders have pushed back against claims of anti-Chinese bias, emphasizing that their demands center on regulatory enforcement, not nationality. The organization insists it only wants the same tax, customs and commercial rules applied evenly to all businesses operating in the Dominican Republic, regardless of who owns them. García reiterated that the group only wants regulators to inspect all establishments uniformly to ensure every business operates under the same legal and fiscal rules.
Despite FDC’s clarifications, Ng Báez has maintained that public framing of the issue requires extreme caution. She argues that scrutiny of specific noncompliant businesses must not be allowed to turn into collective accusations that target the entire Chinese-Dominican community.
At its core, the ongoing debate revolves around two competing priorities: the longstanding demand from Dominican formal merchants for equal enforcement of existing fiscal and commercial regulations, and the equally urgent need to prevent targeted criticism of a small number of businesses from bleeding into widespread discrimination and xenophobia against the Dominican Chinese community. As the discussion moves forward, the Dominican government’s tax and customs agencies now face pressure to respond to FDC’s calls for increased oversight while balancing concerns about community tensions.