A jewelry livestream buried jade for viewers to 'find' — regulators buried the show

Hotan Shengxian Jewelry (和田圣贤珠宝) ran a livestream format built on suspense: an excavator would dig on camera in Xinjiang's jade-bearing riverbeds, and viewers would watch a piece of raw hetian jade surface in real time, then bid on it. From January 2025 the company staged the reveal — jade stones were buried in the excavator's bucket beforehand, so every dig was guaranteed to 'find' something.

Xinjiang's jade country runs on the premise that raw stone from the source is harder to fake than a finished piece sold on a counter, and livestreamed 'live digging' had become a genre precisely because it seemed to prove authenticity by showing the moment of discovery. A staged dig sells that proof twice: once to the viewer who bids believing the excavator, and once to the wider market, which loses the one format that was supposed to be harder to fake than a photo.

The Moyu County market regulator in Hotan prefecture caught the staging and fined the company ¥30,000 in April 2025, publishing the case as one of several livestream-commerce examples the national market regulator circulated that April — a small fine next to the platform bans and criminal referrals other livestream fraud cases drew the same year, but a public record tying the company's name to a rigged show.