Taobao Villages Help Chinese Farmers Achieve Their Dream of Prosperity

Amid the nationwide shopping frenzy of "Double 11," Chinese farmers are playing an increasingly important role.

At the recently held "'Guangdong Goods Online' Summit Forum Junpu E-commerce Village Sub-venue," reporters learned that e-commerce operators in Junpu Taobao Village, Jieyang City, Guangdong Province, had already made "ample preparations."

Wang Gang, owner of the Proya leather goods store in Junpu Village, said, "We have stocked 3-5 times our usual inventory, ready to boost sales during 'Double 11.'"

Xu Zhuangbin, president of the Jieyang Junpu E-commerce Association, said, "At important junctures like 'Double 11,' we will organize and plan marketing and promotional activities to enhance the visibility and influence of Junpu e-commerce."

Today, walking along the streets of Junpu, delivery vehicles hurriedly pass by, and shop owners along the street are busy with business in an orderly manner, making it hard to imagine that Junpu Village was once a well-known "problem village" in the area.

In earlier years, Junpu, as a gathering place for small food processing, was once very prosperous. However, under the impact of downward pressure on the global economy, the extensive small workshop industrial model encountered obstacles to development, and most villagers in Junpu Village could only go out to work; even worse, due to the chaotic management of the previous village committee, conflicts arose frequently in Junpu Village.

In 2012, as a group of villagers returned to the village to start businesses and achieved significant economic benefits through a model combining physical store wholesale with expanded online marketing, this stirred the keen nerves of the entire village's residents to "go online and get wired."

Seeing the business opportunity of low investment and high returns, the villagers followed suit one after another, with a chain reaction of "one telling ten, ten telling a hundred." The village's e-commerce entrepreneurial atmosphere soared, driving many villagers who had been working elsewhere to return home and idle laborers in the village to open online stores and start businesses or find employment.

Villager Huang Shuli had long worked and lived in Yunnan. A few months ago, he returned to Junpu and saw the earth-shaking changes in the village. He said that in the past, he had gone out to seek development because the village was poor, but now he saw that Junpu Village had become more beautiful and the e-commerce economy had also developed rapidly. "I plan to adjust my career plan and invest in property in the village."

As of the first half of 2014, among the village's 490 households with a total population of 2,695, 350 households and more than 1,500 people had already engaged in online sales activities, opening more than 3,000 Taobao online stores and more than 200 physical stores, with a monthly transaction volume of about 800,000 orders, monthly transaction value of nearly 136 million yuan, per capita monthly sales of nearly 50,000 yuan, and per capita profit of more than 6,000 yuan, equivalent to the annual per capita income of Jieyang City. Among the 14 large e-commerce "Taobao Villages" nationwide selected by Alibaba, Junpu Village ranked 7th.

In fact, "Taobao Villages" like Junpu Village are not uncommon across the country. Qingyanliu Village in Yiwu City, Zhejiang; Wantou Village in Boxing, Shandong; and Peixie Village in Longyan, Fujian, among others, have all identified their own positioning and achieved significant growth in village-level economies.

"Taobao Villages have greatly increased farmers' incomes and promoted the transformation and upgrading of the rural economy," said Wang Xianqing, director of the Institute of Circulation Economy at Guangdong University of Finance and Economics. "But currently, Taobao Villages still have problems such as severe product homogenization, weak infrastructure in logistics and communications, and a shortage of talent."

Some scholars believe that although some Taobao Villages have completed considerable "primitive accumulation" in their current development trajectory, they have also reached the "development ceiling" attainable through "wild growth," and in the future urgently need to seek breakthroughs in brand innovation, talent cultivation, and other aspects from a higher and farther perspective. "Taobao Villages need to work hard on brand cultivation and gradually form a differentiated development path," said Cui Min, director of the Guangdong Southern E-commerce Innovation Service Center.