by Julie Makinen / © 2016, Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Last fall, 30-year-old Luo Rong quit his $30,000-a-year engineering job in Shanghai, moved back to his mountaintop village of Jade Peak [Yufeng, Jiangxi Province] with his wife and newborn baby and opened a shop with a big orange and green sign out front.
The store is thinly stocked. There are a few packages of seeds, Skittles candy, some sweaters, sneakers and laundry soap—but no lack of customers.
The main draw is Luo’s computer and the big-screen display perched above him on the wall—both provided by the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. From 7:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., breaking only for meals at his parents’ house, Luo pecks away at his keyboard, helping his technology-challenged neighbors buy fertilizer, TVs and even electric cars on an Alibaba shopping site called Rural Taobao. Luo arranges the payments, as well as delivery to Jade Peak, and earns a commission from the sellers.
Embracing convenience
“This is going to change the whole village,” said Luo Laibing, a 56-year-old farmer who stopped by to purchase more than 1,000 pounds of fertilizer. “It’s saving us money and time and is making life much more convenient.”
Rural Taobao is an ambitious effort by Alibaba to turn China’s 600 million rural residents into online shoppers—and sellers.
But the company is hardly going it alone. It’s getting a big helping hand from the government, which is footing the bill to renovate storefronts like Luo’s, sending officials out to talk up e-commerce to skeptical farmers, providing gratis space for new logistics centers and deploying propaganda workers to promote Rural Taobao.
Government officials and Alibaba executives say Rural Taobao jibes neatly with national goals such as boosting consumer spending to fuel economic growth, narrowing the income gap between urban and rural citizens, promoting entrepreneurship and harnessing the power of the Internet to invigorate backward regions.
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