PICTURE OF GROWTH
Chinese farmers turn to video
‘Do you want a piece?” beekeeper Ma Gongzuo says, looking into the camera of a friend’s smartphone before biting into the dripping comb of amber-coloured honey. The video clip goes out to his 737,000 followers on Douyin, a Chinese video-sharing app that has 400 million users and has turned Ma into something of a celebrity.
Creating videos has become a popular sales tactic for Chinese farmers: the clips show increasingly discerning consumers the origins of the product and provide a window into rural life that captures audience imagination.
For some like Ma Gongzuo, it has helped them find a way out of poverty.
“Everyone said I was good for nothing when they saw that I’d come back,” the 31 year-old says of his return to his village after a failed attempt at running an online clothing business.
“They tell us that we can only get out of poverty if we study and get a job in a city.”
Today, Ma drives an expensive car and has already earned enough to buy property and help his parents and fellow villagers with their homes and businesses.
In 2015, Ma took on the family honey producing business in the verdant hills of Zhejiang province, and thanks to e-commerce apps, managed to earn yearly revenue of 1 million yuan (US$142,000).
But when sales began to stall in November 2018, he began posting videos about his life on the farm. They showed him opening up a hive surrounded by a swarm of bees, swimming bare-chested in a river, and chopping wood.
“I never advertise my products. I show my daily life, the landscapes of the countryside. That’s what interests people,” Ma says.
“Of course people suspect that I’m selling honey. But they decide to get in touch with me to say they want to buy some.”
As with most transactions in China, where hard cash is less and less popular, orders are paid for via WeChat or AliPay.
Ma says he now sells between 2 and 3 million yuan ($285,000 and $428,000) worth of honey each year, as well as dried sweet potato and brown sugar.
“When I was young we were poor,” he recalls. “At school I used to admire other kids who had pocket money, because I never had any.”
Now he drives a 4x4 BMW that cost around 760,000 yuan ($108,000) and has also invested in building a bed-and-breakfast.
“Using Douyin, that was the turning point,” he says. “Today I can buy my family what they need. I help the other villagers to sell their products too. All of the local economy benefits.”
Online apps have played a vital role in Ma’s success.
“It’s progress,” his father Ma Jianchun says happily. “We old people are overwhelmed. With the money, we’ve been able to renovate our house.”
China is home to the world’s largest market for live video broadcasting, according to the US audit firm Deloitte.
Getting in on the trend, Douyin’s parent company ByteDance, which also owns TikTok, has organised training for 26,000 farmers on how to master the art of making videos.
There are other similar platforms including Kuaishou and Yizhibo.
Taobao, the most popular e-commerce app in the country, launched a project in 2019 showing farmers how to become livestreaming hosts in a bid to help them earn more.
The number of people living under the poverty line in rural China has fallen dramatically — from 700 million in 1978 to 16.6 million in 2018, according to government figures.
But the depopulation of the countryside continues, as many Chinese head to cities in search of better-paid jobs.
“We want to be an example, to show young people that it is entirely possible to set up a business and earn money in rural areas,” explains university-educated Ma Gongzuo.
“We hope that more will return, so that life and the economy can resume in the villages.”
We want to .. show young people that it is entirely possible to set up a business and earn money in rural areas
MA GONGZUO