Residents of Gansu's Chengxian county escape from poverty by engaging in e-business

Li Linping arranges products in the sales area at the Longxiaonan E-commerce Co. Ltd. facility. (www.cnr.cn/Han Jing)

Thirty-four-year-old Li Linping currently works as the assistant manager of an enterprise that is based in and sells characteristic agricultural products from Chengxian county, Gansu province, known as Longxiaonan E-commerce Co. Ltd. She began working in a marketing role at the organization following her return to the county in 2015 after she graduated from university in Lanzhou, Gansu’s capital. Li demonstrated a lot of interest in e-business and quickly learned a lot about the undertaking. Her career has developed in parallel to the e-commerce boom that has occurred in the mountainous Longnan county in recent years.

Chengxian was added to China’s national list of impoverished counties in 2013. At the time 55,800 of its residents lived in absolute poverty; its poverty incidence stood at 25.47 percent. E-business has played an important role in the campaign that the government launched to help address the situation.

The Chengxian government has invested more than 1.7 billion yuan (US$249.22 million) in improving the infrastructure in the county in recent years. The efforts have reduced logistics costs for Longxiaonan and numerous other companies and have made it possible for them to expand rapidly. Li and her coworkers began purchasing agricultural products from nearly 100 of Chengxian’s poverty-stricken households and providing unified branding and marketing services as the projects progressed in order to develop their business and become more competitive. 

Some of the county’s impoverished residents became partners and distributors, and the company also began employing poverty-stricken residents of local villages. Dozens of companies like Longxiaonan have helped reduce poverty in Chengxian. More than 9,000 of the county’s residents had escaped from poverty by engaging in e-commerce by the end of 2019; Chengxian’s poverty rate had fallen to 0.53 percent, and the administrative area was removed from the national list of impoverished counties.

“Our company is on the same wavelength as Chengxian’s impoverished farmers,” Li explained. “We will intensify efforts to promote and sell the agricultural products that they produce and will provide greater assistance to them in order to achieve win-win outcomes.”