New Understanding of E-commerce and Beautiful Countryside Construction
Touching the Pulse of Cutting-edge Development
--Jinchang City Delegation's Study Tour to Zhejiang and Jiangsu on E-commerce
and "Beautiful Countryside" Construction
At the end of November, Wu Mingming, Secretary of the Jinchang Municipal Party Committee, Wang Chunjiang, Member of the Standing Committee of the Municipal Party Committee and Executive Vice Mayor, and Gu Jiancheng, Assistant Mayor, led a delegation composed of the Municipal Bureau of Commerce, the Municipal Bureau of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, the Municipal Government Information Office, the Municipal Tourism Bureau, Jinchang Radio and Television Network Company, and county and district leaders to Hangzhou City and Suichang County in Zhejiang Province, and Jiangyin City in Jiangsu Province, to study and learn from the good experience and practices of developed regions in e-commerce development and "Beautiful Countryside" construction.
The delegation successively visited and studied the Alibaba Group headquarters located in Binjiang District, Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province; China's number one county in rural e-commerce -- Suichang County, Lishui City, Zhejiang Province; and "Beautiful Countryside" construction demonstration sites such as Zhouzhuang New Village and Shanquan Village in Zhouzhuang Town, Jiangyin City, Jiangsu Province. Carrying questions with them, they learned and reflected along the way. While broadening their horizons and increasing their knowledge, they gained a clearer perception of the ideas and models for developing e-commerce in Jinchang City, and a newer understanding of "Beautiful Countryside" construction.
Alibaba Headquarters: Feeling the Pulse of the Internet Era
Alibaba Group is a globally renowned internet company. This year, the news of Alibaba's listing on the New York Stock Exchange attracted the attention of Chinese people and even the whole world. On the afternoon of the 27th, Wu Mingming and the delegation first visited Alibaba's Hangzhou headquarters in Binjiang District.
Alibaba has long been well known as a leader in the diversified internet industry, repeatedly innovating in industry, platforms, and business models. In particular, its Taobao, Tmall, Alipay, Juhuasuan, and other leading consumer e-commerce, online payment, B2B online trading market, and cloud computing businesses have developed at an astonishing speed.
Walking into the Alibaba corporate campus, one is immediately struck by the modern buildings before them. The soft lines and the pairing of modern stylistic elements give a feeling of boundless freedom. The Alibaba people walking nearby give the impression of being full of fighting spirit and vitality, daring to let dreams shine into reality.
A few days earlier, Alibaba Group signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the Gansu Provincial Government. According to the agreement, Alibaba will raise the development level of Gansu's e-commerce enterprises, support qualified cities and counties in building Taobao "Specialty Pavilions," and guide pilot rural areas in carrying out e-commerce services. Gansu will guide and select qualified villages to carry out e-commerce pilots, strengthen rural internet infrastructure construction, and increase training in e-commerce knowledge for rural cadres and rural youth. The main leaders of the Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government keenly captured this development opportunity and took the lead in connecting with Alibaba to accelerate the city's e-commerce development, which can be said to have come at exactly the right time.
As the relevant person in charge of Alibaba gave a detailed introduction to Alibaba's campus distribution, development history, and the company's four major business development directions -- e-commerce, small and micro financial services, cloud computing and big data, and Cainiao logistics -- Wu Mingming and other municipal leaders and delegation members gained a deeper understanding of Alibaba. At Alibaba's monitoring data display center, the famous Alibaba monitoring large-screen real-time data wall left the delegation deeply impressed. This wall concentrated all the data of Alibaba's current online shopping platform. The rapidly changing data across the entire wall made people personally feel the strong pulse of the internet era. Terms such as "cloud computing," "e-commerce," "smart city," and "modern logistics" may sound a bit "high-end," but when it was mentioned that "during this year's 'Double 11,' agricultural products such as Gansu's walnuts, apples, and yak meat traded vigorously online," the distance between Alibaba and the Jinchang City delegation was quickly narrowed.
Wu Mingming expressed appreciation for Alibaba's remarkable achievements in the field of e-commerce, and hoped that Alibaba could pay more attention to Jinchang, increase exchanges and cooperation, fully leverage Alibaba's e-commerce platform advantages and Jinchang's local specialty agricultural product resource advantages, drive the development of rural e-commerce in Jinchang, promote online sales of Jinchang specialties, and enhance product visibility.
The "Suichang Model": A Model Showroom for Agricultural Product E-commerce
How to develop e-commerce? What role does the government play in promoting e-commerce development? How can rural specialty agricultural products connect with e-commerce for future development? On November 30, the Jinchang City delegation came to the country's "number one Taobao county" -- Suichang County, Lishui City, Zhejiang Province, located in the mountainous area of southwestern Zhejiang, to find out.
More than 2,000 Taobao stores, with total sales expected to exceed 500 million yuan this year... Opening online stores has become an important employment channel for many university graduates, laid-off workers, and rural migrant workers in Suichang. With the development of online stores, the county's express delivery industry, farmers' professional cooperatives, and large rural farming households have been driven to actively engage in the development of agriculture and the express delivery industry. In just a few years, Suichang County has become a well-known "Taobao county" in the province and even across the country. On January 8, 2013, Taobao's first county-level pavilion nationwide, "Special China -- Suichang Pavilion," opened. In October 2013, the Alibaba Research Center and the Information Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences released the "Suichang Model," which is regarded as China's first agricultural product e-commerce model driven by a service platform.
The delegation conducted on-site inspections of the Maitelong warehouse-style specialty products mall and the Suichang Online Store Association, and gained a detailed understanding of the operation model and development situation of rural e-commerce in Suichang. Ye Zhaohui, Deputy County Magistrate of Suichang County, introduced that Suichang's e-commerce development cannot be separated from the local government's high attention and strong support. The Suichang County Government strongly supports and provides "endorsement" for Suichang's e-commerce reputation. All relevant government departments "follow up" with online stores, regularly inspect and test the quality of online store products, and ensure that goods flowing out of Suichang are 100 percent qualified. In addition to building a quality and safety guarantee mechanism, the Suichang County Government supports rather than intervenes in e-commerce development, granting responsibilities and powers to an intermediate public service platform -- the Suichang County Online Store Association.
According to reports, in March 2010, led by the government and jointly initiated by multiple enterprises and units, the Suichang Online Store Association was established to build a public service platform, integrate resources upward, and realize intensive marketing of agricultural and sideline products; downward, it advocates online entrepreneurship, provides free training, realizes zero-cost store opening and centralized distribution of agricultural products, and builds a rural e-commerce ecological chain, enabling online store operators to move from "fighting alone" to "fighting as a group," effectively reducing operational difficulty and risk. In March 2011, the association also opened the Maitelong specialty products warehouse mall, specifically collecting specialty agricultural products. At present, the platform has integrated more than 1,100 product resources, 80-90% of which are specialty agricultural products. Relying on booming e-commerce, Suichang County has brought specialty agricultural products hidden deep in the mountains to all parts of the country.
E-commerce entering villages faces several difficulties. One is that people cannot buy: many villagers do not have computers at home and cannot get online; the second problem is that they do not know how to buy: few people in rural areas know how to shop online; the third problem is that goods cannot be delivered: logistics companies are still unable to cover the village level. For these problems, delegation members found answers at the Suichang County "Ganjie" county-level operations center and the "Ganjie" outlet at the new rural e-commerce service station in Kengkou Village, Sanren She Ethnic Township.
Since "Ganjie" established its first Ganjie village-level e-commerce service station in Suichang in 2013, the county has now established 128 "Ganjie" village-level outlets. "Ganjie"'s solution is to find a convenience store in each village as an e-commerce partner. "Ganjie" provides each village outlet with a computer that can access the internet, and the outlet owner sends and receives parcels on behalf of villagers, and also provides services for buying and selling online goods on behalf of villagers, providing a carrier for online external sales of agricultural products, helping villagers promote fresh local specialty products they want to sell to the Taobao "Special China -- Suichang Pavilion" at the earliest opportunity, and conducting online external sales. With such a service point, the "last kilometer" problem of e-commerce entering villages is readily solved.
At present, Jinchang City has proposed to accelerate the development of e-commerce and boost the rapid development of modern service industries. In response, the city has established an e-commerce development leading group and researched and formulated the "Implementation Opinions on E-commerce Development in Jinchang City." The advanced experience gained by Suichang County in developing rural e-commerce is very worth learning from.