Ma made a similar promise to work with government departments and devote more efforts to weed out fake goods during the meeting with Zhang last month.

That meeting also put an end to a highly unusual episode in which Taobao staff publicly clashed with the market regulator.

The row started when the commerce authority released a report on its website on Jan 23, blaming unnamed online shopping platforms for failing to supervise products and services that infringed upon trademarks, as well as for substandard or fake products.

However, it escalated after Taobao released an open letter on its micro blog accusing Liu Hongliang, who is in charge of regulating online trade at the administration, of "using a wrong method and reaching a conclusion that is not objective."

The regulator responded by releasing a report directly condemning Taobao for failing to clean up what it called illegal business deals on the e-commerce titan's platforms.