China’s live-streaming e-commerce offers lifeline to fruit farmers amid Covid restrictions and short season

Local farmers have come to rely more on Big Tech platforms to boost sales in recent years, but a tough season for some produce is proving challenging for some

Live-streaming platforms from Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and Pinduoduo have helped turn China’s agricultural e-commerce into a US$63 billion market

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Jiang Jiaqi shoots videos for his Douyin account while gathering fruit on China’s eastern Xishan Island. Photo: Yaling Jiang

Published: 10:30am, 25 Jun 2022

Each June, Xishan Island, an eastern tourist destination surrounded by green mountains along Suzhou’s Taihu Lake, is typically congested with tourists in what has become known as the “loquat traffic jam” or “bayberry traffic jam”, a result of visitors from nearby regions such as Shanghai rushing to get a taste of the hyper-seasonal local fruits.

This year, however, the town is quiet. Travel-wary consumers remain concerned about Covid-19 restrictions and quarantine rules owing to recent outbreaks in Shanghai and southern Jiangsu province, where Xishan is located. Only one part of the island remains bustling with activity: the logistics businesses helping package fruit sold through e-commerce.

Along a street with two of these courier services sits Jiang Jiaqi’s storefront, which doubles as an office and is sometimes used as a budget studio for live streams and short videos. Jiang, who returned to his hometown six years ago after working in Suzhou’s manufacturing industry, uses his family-run e-commerce business to sell local agricultural products with his wife, a former clothing exporter.

Jiang and his wife are just two of millions of agricultural e-commerce merchants contributing to what was a 422 billion yuan (US$63 billion) industry in China last year. The market has nearly tripled from 150 billion yuan in 2015.

Affected by travel restrictions due to Covid-19 outbreaks in nearby regions, logistics businesses are now the only places bustling with activity on Xishan Island as they package up fruit sold online. Photo: Yaling Jiang

Part of the reason for the rapid growth, which comes amid a slowing economy in China, is President Xi Jinping’s push for a “rural revitalisation” to improve farmers’ livelihoods. But joining the race to peddle produce online comes with new challenges for those not familiar with the work.

At 36 years old, Jiang’s career change came with a big change in his environment. He went from managing production queues of precision instruments to working with logistics personnel and responding to clients on his smartphone. He also got to ditch his work uniform for a straw hat he uses to shield himself from the scorching sun while hiking through mountains to pick fruit, and filming it all for his online profiles.

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