How China’s Digital Farmers Can Grow a Post-COVID-19 Future
At the beginning of 2020, China’s central government announced plans to pilot a “digital village”, writes Winston Ma Wenyan at World Economic Forum. It’s the country’s latest push towards a “Digital China” since the information consumption policy of 2013, which promotes the use of information technology to stimulate more domestic consumption, leading to a boom in the mobile internet-driven economy.
According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), as of March 2020, China had the world’s largest online population (903 million people) with the percentage of those using mobile phones to go online exceeding 99%. For many people in China, especially in rural areas, a consumer’s first internet experience is often via mobile rather than desktop. In fact, farmers have been quick to adopt a digital lifestyle, using mobile payments and online video entertainment. In some areas, the extent to which villagers are connected to the internet is greater than in large cities.
Mobile payment is more popular – to the surprise of many – in China’s underdeveloped western regions than its coastal cities. As early as 2014, the Tibet autonomous region led the country in mobile payment adoption, which was followed by the remote provinces of Shanxi and Ningxia. In these provinces, a higher percentage of the online transactions were paid by consumers with mobile devices, way ahead of the cosmopolitan cities of Beijing and Shanghai.
In the following years, Tibet remained at the top of the ranking and in 2016 was the first province to reach a mobile payment rate of 90%. The reason is quite understandable: there is a lack of bricks-and-mortar retail infrastructure and a banking system in those regions, so the people there turn to online shopping and mobile payment more frequently for the products they try to find.
In more recent years, the mobile internet and digital technologies have had a profound impact on China’s rural economy:
1. More farmers can become e-commerce entrepreneurs. In China, mobile internet creates jobs in rural areas, turning farmers into online vendors. For example, Chinese fruit farmers used to sit and wait on the side of the roads for buyers, but few motorists stopped to buy because most traffic had moved to newly built motorways. The farmers frequently had to dump rotten grapes and oranges on the roadside. Now a rural entrepreneur only needs to have a 20㎡ space, a second-hand computer (or, even better, a smartphone) and a basic internet connection to become a global retailer.
When new channels are created to transport farm produce to cities, every farmer can be an online merchant as the demand in cities for fresh, safe agricultural products grows rapidly – a trend expedited by COVID-19. With social media messaging and payment infrastructure provided by major platforms including Alibaba and Tencent, farmers can easily handle large trade volumes for customers from every corner of China and even reach global markets.
Continue reading at World Economic Forum.
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