E-commerce Helps Farmers Get on the Fast Track to Prosperity
Interview with a Party Congress Delegate
--An Interview with Ren Qingsheng, Party Congress Delegate and Party Branch Secretary of Dinglou Village, Daji Town, Cao County
"Our city treats e-commerce as an important breakthrough for industrial transformation and leapfrog development. The 2017 China Taobao Village Summit will be held in Heze..." On February 15, taking advantage of a break in the meetings, Ren Qingsheng studied the municipal Party committee work report carefully in his room. He read and reread every mention of e-commerce.
As Party branch secretary of Dinglou Village in Daji Town, Ren Qingsheng was the one who "ate the crab first" in our city's rural Taobao sector, and his experience is a microcosm of the rapid development of e-commerce in our city. As the only farmer delegate on the presidium of the congress, Ren Qingsheng was especially proud.
"In 2013, at the first China Taobao Village Summit, Dinglou Village was rated a Chinese 'Taobao Village' by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Alibaba Group. In 2015, our village registered 30 performance costume and dance shoe companies, developed 32 new Taobao merchants, opened 810 Taobao online stores, employed 860 people online and offline, and recorded online sales of 90 million yuan. In 2016, Dinglou Village's e-commerce sales exceeded 200 million yuan..." When it came to e-commerce development, Ren Qingsheng, normally a man of few words, talked on and on.
Yet in the 1990s, Dinglou Village was a poverty-stricken village known far and wide. Like most young people in the village, Ren Qingsheng had always worked away from home. "I worked in coal mines in Shanxi and also worked as an electrician in Zibo. Migrant work was hard, and I could not save much money either." Ren Qingsheng said that after working desperately for a year, after deducting expenses for fertilizer, seeds, and the children's schooling, there was simply no surplus left, and at Chinese New Year he could not even afford to buy the children new clothes.
With no technical skills and little education, Ren Qingsheng could only do manual labor at construction sites. While carrying materials one time, a steel nail pierced through the sole of his foot. Reluctant to spend money on bandaging it, Ren Qingsheng treated the wound with a folk remedy and rested for only one morning before limping along and pulling a wooden handcart again.
It was not until 2010 that, by chance, Ren Qingsheng and his wife learned about the new phenomenon of online stores. In April of that year, they used an assembled computer bought for 1,400 yuan to start a business selling photography clothing. Unexpectedly, on their very first order, they sold 36 outfits and earned more than 600 yuan.
Having tasted the sweetness of "going online," Ren Qingsheng then shifted his energy to the internet, opening an online store, placing orders, and shipping goods. Over a year, he actually earned more than 6,000 yuan. Ren Qingsheng had more than 4 mu of land, and one mu brought in at most about 1,000 yuan a year. Just sitting in front of a computer, in less than 8 months, he earned more than two years of farming income, which strengthened his confidence in doing e-commerce.
In 2011, Ren Qingsheng received an order: a school in Humen, Guangdong, ordered 1,000 sets of performance costumes. At that time, however, the whole village had only 4 household workshop-style production sites and simply could not produce them. "The cooked duck flew away again." Ren Qingsheng had to give up the order.
Afterward, he built a simple workshop at his own home, hired 5 or 6 employees, and began making performance costumes; in April 2013 he registered his own company; last year, Ren Qingsheng also registered a trademark, and sales approached 10 million yuan.
From being unable to afford new clothes for his children at Chinese New Year to annual sales approaching 10 million, Ren Qingsheng completed a life "counterattack" from farmer to boss. At the same time, in Dinglou Village, the number of people engaged in the e-commerce industry, like Ren Qingsheng, grew exponentially. "Now of the village's 310 households, more than 280 are doing Taobao, accounting for more than 90% of the village's total households." Ren Qingsheng said that impoverished
people who are unable to open online stores, such as older elderly people, can take on work such as cutting, making frog button closures, and attaching embroidery.
"Last Chinese New Year, our village's villagers bought back another 9 cars, all priced at around 300,000 yuan. Now almost every household in the village has a car," Ren Qingsheng said, his joy over the village's changes showing plainly.
"This year, I not only want to consolidate the domestic market, but also put effort into opening up foreign markets. At the same time, I also want to lead the villagers in developing specialty agriculture, deeply processing agricultural products, and selling them through internet platforms, then turning the consolidated land into picking gardens and ecological parks, and truly building our village into a beautiful village." Ren Qingsheng is full of confidence about future development. Reporter Liu Yang