Graduates pushing Gansu produce online

To ring in the Lunar New Year, Zhang Mingxia put on a red cotton coat and cooked potato noodles before switching on the camera to start a livestream.

The 26-year-old swiftly juggled between promoting and pitching the noodles, interacting with first-time watchers, answering their questions about pricing and delivery and taking occasional slurps of the burning-hot noodles by way of encouragement.

For Zhang, the Chinese New Year holiday, from Jan 22 to 27 this year, is not just about family get-togethers, it is also a golden opportunity to promote local farm products and improve the incomes of fellow villagers.

Born into a farming family in Longxi county, Gansu province, Zhang knows how difficult selling agricultural products is for her parents. Gansu is an agricultural province in the arid, landlocked northwest, and selling farm goods is troublesome because yield depends on the weather and prices are volatile.

So after graduating from college in 2019, she returned to her hometown with the ambition of selling agricultural products via livestreaming with seven other graduates who also grew up in rural areas.

Livestreaming is difficult.

At first, Zhang did not know how to present products, and felt overwhelmed even answering questions from her 14 followers.

Some made fun of her solid build. In response, Zhang named her account the "chubby helper of Gansu farmers" to make the most of her unique appeal.

"It's not a problem for me, as long as it helps to sell the farm products," she said.

Zhang and her team soon grew dissatisfied with selling potato noodles and decided to promote other Gansu products to buyers nationwide.

They pooled funds to rent a car and set off on a treasure hunt across the province.

"We look young, so it can be challenging to gain the trust of villagers. Occasionally, we arranged a purchase only to find they had changed their minds the next day because they did not believe we could sell their products online," said Zhang's colleague, Yang Xiaoqiang.

Through perseverance and learning from mistakes, Zhang became a local celebrity, and requests began to flood in to help farmers sell their unsold harvests.

Currently, they sell lilies, honey melon and pine mushrooms, and about 340,000 people follow their account on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

According to Zhang, the team has helped Gansu farmers sell 1.5 million kilograms of products over the past three years and made about 300,000 orders last year alone.

"Livestreaming e-commerce is a new way for farmers to raise their revenues and is drawing in more young people to participate in the cause of rural vitalization," said Zhang, who now makes a stable living from livestreaming.

Statistics from Douyin suggest that by the end of last year, the generation born in the 1990s accounted for 45 percent of broadcasters selling agricultural products via livestreaming on the platform.

"We have also achieved a sense of self-worth and enjoy a feeling of success from helping other farmers," she said.

"We want to prove that even a remote mountain village can be a stage for college graduates."

Xinhua