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Rural E-Commerce Programs Can Work. So Why Do Some Fail?


In the span of just 40 years, China’s place in the public imagination has changed from rural backwater to a land of massive, gleaming cities and high-tech innovation. Yet there were still more than half a billion people living in the country’s rural hinterlands in 2019, many of whom have been left behind by an increasingly digitized economy. At its core, their dilemma is twofold: They can’t buy and they can’t sell. That is to say, there’s no outlet for their farm produce or their labor, and they don’t have the access to the high-quality, cheap industrial products ubiquitous in urban areas.


This persistent urban-rural gap — and the question of how to keep the countryside from becoming a casualty of urbanization — has frustrated policymakers for years. More recently, the government has placed its hopes on “rural e-commerce” as a viable solution to this conundrum. In 2015, in the interests of “promoting the advancement of agriculture, stimulating rural development, and boosting farmers’ revenue,” the central government made rural e-commerce a key policy focus, and related initiatives have since been rolled out nationwide, especially in impoverished areas.


These efforts have already had a profound impact on the countryside. In his survey of an e-commerce-focused “Taobao village” in the eastern province of Jiangsu, the anthropologist Zhou Daming noted that the internet and improved logistical networks have greatly reduced geographical and temporal constraints, allowing villagers to develop trading networks across increasingly large and diverse regions and giving them a foothold in national or even global markets. In some areas, agglomerations of rural e-commerce businesses have even accelerated the transformation of villages into townships, and townships into cities.


Rural e-commerce has not been successful everywhere, however. To gain a more nuanced understanding of why, it may be useful to break down one particular failed experiment to see what it can tell us about the current state of rural e-commerce and the rural-urban market system.

Gumu County — I have changed all place and company names to protect the identities of my research participants — is located in a rural part of North China known for producing chestnuts. In line with the provincial government’s stated aim of achieving “province-wide coverage of rural e-commerce,” Gumu selected a relatively new e-commerce company, Taole, to set up a rural e-commerce public service center in the county.


Read More at http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1006806/rural-e-commerce-programs-can-work.-so-why-do-some-fail%3F

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