FROM THE FARM GATE TO YOUR DOOR, VIA THE NET

Two years ago Huang Sixiu was inspecting shops on the e-commerce platform Taobao and came across an unusual sight. It was someone selling produce, but this was far from your regular Taobao shopping site. What Huang saw was a farmer standing among jujube trees in Cangzhou, Hebei province, hawking his wares to the world via live-streaming.

Almost instantly Huang knew that this was something she was going to get into－not selling jujubes, but using the power off live-streaming either to make money for herself, to do something to help her hometown financially, or both.

"I knew nothing about live-streaming but decided to give it a try," says Huang, 30, who was born and raised in the remote village of Pingqiao in Pu'an, a poverty-stricken county of Qianxinan Bouyei and Miao autonomous prefecture in Guizhou province.

Despite Huang's hefty parenting duties－she has two children, one aged 3 and the other 1－she finds she has plenty of free time. That time, she decided, could be turned to good account, and now she does a live-stream webcast of three hours almost every day, the subject matter including visits to local markets and cooking meals.

"I remember the first time I did live-streaming. I went to the market just a few steps from home, camera in hand. As I switched on the camera I had no idea what I was going to say. So I just introduced myself and said where I was from. After I scanned the homegrown fruit and vegetables sold in the market many viewers left messages saying how impressive the diversity of the products was and asked how much they cost."

That debut live-streaming attracted more than 150 viewers, and when she live-streamed the next day, the number of viewers doubled.

"The demand for organic products is huge from urban consumers," Huang says.

In November 2018 she started regularly selling seasonal harvests of local agricultural products, such as chestnuts, potatoes and walnuts. During the shows viewers are given links that allow them to buy items they see. Each show now attracts more than 10,000 viewers, she says. From selling to packaging products, Huang does almost all the work herself, and she has a stable base of regular viewers that produces about 20 orders a day.

"My husband works during the week, so he helps me take the packages to the delivery station during weekends. I'm amazed that so many people all over the country watch someone in a remote village far from where they live. It feels good to know they trust me."

Her monthly profit is between 2,000 yuan ($280) and 3,000 yuan, she says.

"I sometimes take my children with me to the market. Viewers are attracted to the cute babies and the beautiful scenery of my hometown, including the surrounding mountains."

Before starting her live-streaming business, Huang worked in a shoe factory in Dongguan, Guangdong province, from 2009 to 2011. She has two brothers. As the only girl in her family, Huang dropped out of school after graduating from high school due to poverty. In 2011, Huang returned to her hometown and opened a convenience store.

Online sales offer more opportunities to sell outside the hometown market, she says, which helps increase income for local farmers. The local government also drew up plans to promote online shopping, such as improving logistic service and reducing delivery cost.

The e-commerce business has tangibly improved Huang's standard of living, and last year she bought a house in town and sent her daughter to a kindergarten instead of taking care of her herself.

Huang is one of a growing number of farmers from rural China who are using social media platforms to promote and sell local products to customers from all over China. Some of Huang's costumers who are full-time mothers also living in rural China have set up their own Taobao stores and sell local agricultural products through live-streaming.

According to a report by Xinhua News Agency on June 3, total revenue of agricultural products sold online reached 283 million yuan from January to April, 28 percent more than in the corresponding period last year.

"Every day we have about 800 to 1,200 orders online that sell over 200 types of local products around the country," says Hua Xi, a Guizhou native in her early 30s who has been helping local farmers sell products such as bamboo shoots, sticky-rice liquor and cinnabar online.

"It helps farmers to raise their incomes and promote entrepreneurship," Hua says.

Hua attended the National People's Congress in Beijing as a deputy last month. Hua, of the Dong ethnic group, says she set up her own e-commerce business in 2015. In April that year she moved her business to Rural Taobao, an e-commerce project set up by Alibaba Group "to turn China's rural residents into online shoppers and sellers". Hua says that by the first half of 2017 the annual value of her sales had surpassed 1 million yuan.

Several weeks ago Cui Shuxia, 80, of Taipingbao village in Xixian New Area, Shaanxi province, appeared in her grandson's live streaming show to promote and sell apricot.

She ate apricot in front of the camera and talked in Shaanxi dialect. Her video has been viewed nearly 2 million times on Sina Weibo, a major Chinese social media platform. Fans are impressed by Cui's sincerity and her humorous and natural way of talking. Cui not only introduced the history of apricot trees in the village but also told her own stories about growing apricot trees.

"Within three hours we received more than 3,000 orders from consumers," Cui's grandson, Wang Yalou, told CCTV. Wang has run an online store selling local agricultural products for five years.

His family has a farmland of 7 mu (about half a hectare) growing apricot trees. Most of the local villagers make a living by growing and selling fruits, especially apricot.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, sales of local agricultural products fell early this year. On May 24 Wang launched the first live-streaming show on Taobao to promote his products.

"I'm very shy when I talk to the camera but my grandmother is very good at it. She knows a lot about apricots because the village she lives in has grown them for more than 100 years and has become very well known because of that."

Now, with apricots in great demand, Wang buys them from local farmers to sell online. "This is going to change the whole village," he says.

During a tour of Zhashui county in Shaanxi province on April 20, President Xi Jinping met a group of merchants who were using live-streaming to sell mu'er, a black fungus. China Central Television showed Xi telling the group that "e-commerce is very important in promoting agricultural products and has a big role to play".

Celebrities also use their star power to promote agricultural products of rural China. For example, on April 6, the live-streaming celebrity Li Jiaqi and the CCTV presenter Zhu Guangquan joined to sell agricultural products from Hubei province, which attracted over 10 million viewers and sold products of over 40 million yuan that night.