China Unionpay, the financial institution that dominates the domestic payment market, recently proposed a plan to cool disputes between its local branches and retailers.

The idea stretches our sense of reality.

A senior manager of China Unionpay suggested the government should allow retailers to include bank card transaction fees in their operation costs to cut their tax base.

According to this "win-win" deal, the statement between local China Unionpay branches and retailers would be easily broken, with the former collecting bank card charges as usual and the latter making good the fees via tax reduction.

More than a month after the quarrel between local China Unionpay and retailers was dramatized in Shenzhen with a two-day boycott on handling credit cards, the headquarters of China Unionpay finally responded to the reality.

Is there such a thing as the kind of "free lunch" touted by China Unionpay?

Definitely not. Taxpayers are fully justified in questioning why they have to foot the bill for some businesses' free lunch.

Since the very beginning when the bank card fiasco was staged in Shenzhen, the local China Unionpay outlet demonstrated indifference to consumers by turning a deaf ear to local retailers' threat of a bank card boycott if transaction charges were not slashed.

Admittedly, it is unfair to attribute retailers' razor-thin profit margins merely to bank card transaction charges. Increasingly fierce competition in the domestic market is the main culprit.

However, instead of reaching out to local retailers with whom they share common interests, local China Unionpay branches have shown they care only for themselves.

They have cited many unconvincing excuses, like high costs and the more expensive fees foreign counterparts collect. Yet none is more unreasonable than this latest proposal.

By trying to shift the burden to public finance in the name of retailers, the tax reduction idea exemplifies the mentality of administrative monopolies. It is just because of the lack of domestic competitors that China Unionpay can try every means to refuse market solutions.

Perhaps realizing the problem of the new suggestion, China Unionpay quickly announced it was only a personal view.

But without any constructive efforts to tackle the evolving problem concerning bank card transaction charges, how can we take any of their words seriously?