by Xiaowei Wang
The strategy is two-pronged: Rural Taobao and Taobao villages. The first involves a series of Rural Taobao Service Centers, which are usually located at the village convenience stores and revolve around one URL: cun.taobao.com. At these Rural Taobao Service Centers, Taobao contracts with one or two local villagers as brand ambassadors. These brand ambassadors are not directly employed by Alibaba but are paid a small amount to help villagers buy and select items, as well as access other services from the e-commerce platform, such as buying train tickets online and scheduling doctor’s appointments. Shopping is the main highlight of rural Taobao, but digital literacy is also emphasized. In the rural Taobao world, “digital” means anything Alibaba-related. Villagers may not be buying gold lighters anytime soon, but practical goods like laundry detergent and long underwear are popular with rural users on the site. Other companies have followed suit with this rural user acquisition strategy: companies from JD.com to Pinduoduo (an e-commerce app that had a US$1.6 billion IPO on NASDAQ) have flooded rural users with an assortment of marketplaces that sell various knockoff, shanzhai brands that cater to the rural income bracket. Scrolling through Pinduoduo, one finds a bizarro land of gonzo-capitalism, with PUMPERS diapers, SHAP TVs, and New Bunren sneakers.
To spend money, you need money. This is the ambitious part of the Alibaba Rural Taobao Strategy: rural economic growth. It involves planting the seeds for a Taobao village. A Taobao village is a place where more than 10 percent of the village households are manufacturing at home for Taobao.com. To accomplish this, Alibaba has a whole branch of its company focused on rural development, rural finance, and rural Taobao. It also has its own rural research institute, AliResearch, which examines the business cycles of Taobao villages to understand their successes and failures.
Dinglou was officially designated by Alibaba in 2012 as the first Taobao village. Since then, the number of Taobao villages has soared from 1,311 in 2016 to 3,202 across twenty-four provinces in China in 2018. When I talked to one researcher at AliResearch, he was hopeful that the number would grow. After all, it’s a win-win model for Alibaba and economists in the central government. It repopulates the countryside and addresses the “hollowed-out village” phenomenon. Young people who leave places like Dinglou village find themselves coming back home instead of staying in cities. One official document from Dinglou boasts that five hundred college students have returned home because of the thriving e-commerce, which is a population boom for a village. It brings talent and knowledge back to the countryside, and ensures that the countryside will also develop, instead of growth concentrating in cities.
And when the villagers aren’t producing goods for Taobao? They still continue to farm their fields. It’s a version of the gig economy, though I can’t quite tell if the farming or the manufacturing is on-demand.
The production focus of Dinglou is on costumes used for stage and film. Over 90 percent of villagers help produce these costumes in some way. We walk through the exhibition hall of the Rural Internet Center. The costume display is eerie, with mannequins that look like they might come alive any second. Elaborate headdresses on top of a Monkey King costume, a plastic mask with two dark holes for eyes. Red puffy gowns for wedding photographs on a mannequin with plastic blond hair sculpted into a flapper bob. A series of animal costumes for small children, for school plays. Santa Claus costumes and a version of a princess that hints at Snow White without totally violating copyright, seven small mannequins behind her that appear to be either children or dwarfs. Army uniforms from all over the world, which upon closer inspection have falling-apart seams, for theater plays and films.
As I walk through the hall, sipping my lukewarm water in the weak air-conditioning, I’m reminded of similar exhibition halls that I’ve seen in Inner Mongolia that herald the joys of rare earth mining and cashmere production. Rural areas have been sites of extraction, conveniently located out of sight for urbanites. Yet in an age when we are shifting to a “digital economy,” when much of our lives revolves around shopping, desiring, and performing for an unknown public online, the existence of a place like Dinglou, making stage costumes, seems to be the obvious, ironic progression.
Rising rents in cities have also pushed factory manufacturing costs up in China, making goods less competitively priced. In the countryside, where rural residents are entitled to land by their hukou, where rent and labor costs are low, the geography of Taobao villages becomes a competitive advantage. This “spatial fix” is something other companies, like Foxconn, are also turning to in a more centralized way, setting up a factory in rural Henan instead of in expensive, urban Shenzhen. It’s no wonder the Rural Revitalization document of the Chinese Communist Party is exuberantly betting on e-commerce. The internet promised disembodiment, but the internet has never been more material. The notion of discrete physical and digital worlds is nothing but a convenient fiction.
5.
It’s Saturday and the screen-printing shop in Dinglou is still hard at work. Banners line the streets of Dinglou and Daji saying, NOTHING BEATS COMING BACK TO YOUR HOMETOWN TO RUN A TAOBAO BUSINESS! The air is hazy, yellow, and dry. Families manufacture costumes during peak seasons like Christmas and Halloween, and during the agricultural planting season they tend to their fields. In the meantime, a whole industry to support costume making has sprouted up in the village, and everyone’s hard at work on costumes during the summer, once the fields have been planted.
The screen-printing shop is just one of many storefronts along a large main street. Embroidery businesses sit next to open fields, with the loud clattering of needles as machines churn out intricate designs, controlled by computers. One street is bumpy, uneven, and filled with large craters. A man is outside torching a rubbery substance, a blast of hot air in the already steaming summer heat. In one family workshop, a wife comes downstairs from the family’s living space to the manufacturing area—the epitome of a startup garage. She outlines patterns onto a thick slab, hundreds of sheets of fabric stacked on top of each other. After she’s done drawing the pattern, she hops up on the table in her kitten-heel shoes and red skirt, without protective eyewear or earplugs. Her husband pulls out a jigsaw, clamps the sheets of fabric to the table, and hands the jigsaw to his wife. She starts cutting through the fabric slab. Her hand is steady as she pushes the jigsaw along the pattern lines. Next to the table is her mother-in-law, who watches, helping affix labels onto packages. After the woman is finished, a couple hundred precut pieces are ready to be sewn and dyed into stage-play army uniforms. Outside, the sound of their dog barking echoes above the buzzing machine noises. A lone chicken squawks.
6.
Ren Qingsheng, the e-commerce pioneer of Dinglou, types with two fingers. He uses his left and right pointer fingers to hunt and peck at the keyboard, vigorously, with a confident clack. His hands are darkened by the sun, rough and calloused. Although he’s a millionaire success story in the village, featured in the Rural Internet Center and also recently elected village party secretary, he’s still often out in the fields, working as part of the village environmental commission. He’s in the office today, running back and forth between the town hall and his family’s workshop, which is also his home, and which sits in front of his family’s agricultural fields.
Most Chinese villages have a set of loudspeakers, strapped to electricity poles, for village announcements. In the morning, as village party secretary, Ren Qingsheng heads toward the village headquarters, a small brick building. Inside the headquarters, tacked to the wall, is a paper Communist Party flag that’s discolored orange from sunlight. Below the flag, in cartoonish font, is a slogan: DEAR, DID YOU TAOBAO TODAY?
He turns on the village PA system with a piece of paper in hand and does the daily announcement. “Fellow comrades, villagers … as you know, we need to get rid of these poplar trees. We must cut them down. We are a proud village. I advise you to cut down the trees. I did it last year and I had more room to plant vegetables. If you love trees, you could replace the popla
r trees with fruit trees. Please ask us for advice.”
In 2009, Ren Qingsheng and his wife decided to start an e-commerce shop, despite lacking business experience or a computer. “The whole thing was actually my wife’s idea,” he explains in his office, overlooking a stack of receipts. “My wife worked as a manual laborer at a nearby sand manufacturing plant. It was really hard work and took a toll on her body. She had to retire early because of the physical toll it took. At home, we weren’t sure how we were going to make ends meet. You have to understand, planting the fields only yields an income of RMB 5,000 a year, if you’re lucky. And we have two children to send to school.”
He pauses. “My wife is educated for a peasant, she went to vocational high school. I have an elementary school education. So she’s much more open to new things than I am. At the time, there was a couple in Dinglou who had been making these costumes for photography studios at home—simple costumes. They would travel around the county on bicycle selling these costumes, because at the time no one had enough money to buy a car. And my wife came up with this idea, she had heard about Taobao from a relative of hers. So she thought, let’s try selling costumes on Taobao.”
To start off their Taobao shop, Ren and his wife borrowed the hefty sum of RMB 1,400 from a family member, to buy their computer. Posting items on Taobao.com was a learning curve for Ren—Chinese characters are input via pinyin, the system of romanization. Ren had to borrow his daughter’s elementary school textbook for the task, since he had dropped out of school before learning pinyin.
After a few months, Ren and his wife received their first order. “At the time, we didn’t know anything about online banking. We had to send out the costumes, and I was so nervous. Every day I would go all the way to the bank and check our bank account. And the money did come! My wife and I immediately went out and bought a whole chicken to slaughter in celebration.”
After this first order, Ren slowly got the hang of online selling and the online payment system, Alipay. Alipay itself got easier and easier to use, morphing into the e-payment, bank transfer, peer-to-peer payment system, and wealth management app it is today.
Over the next few years, he had a steady costume business and some farming income. In 2011, his business grew exponentially after a teacher contacted him for a custom order. Ren had been selling costumes made by other people in the village, but this custom order made him rethink his business model. He put in manufacturing equipment on-site, in his family’s home. Business took off. His combination of premade and custom orders earned him US$1.16 million in 2017. These days he sells all over the world; recent orders have shipped to Vietnam and Korea. International business is expanding because of drop-shipping and AliExpress, a site that bridges foreign buyers with small businesses in China, like Ren’s. His nephew even gave up a lucrative software development job in a nearby city to come back and help run the Taobao store.
The local government is more than willing to take credit now for such e-commerce success, but Ren explains that he was a lone agent for a long time. The local government had absolutely no idea what Ren was doing in his workshop. In 2012, the newly elected county party secretary, Su, visited local homes in the area, including Ren’s. Su was appalled. The computer was in the kitchen, fabric scraps were piled high, and costumes were draped all over the house. Su was alarmed by the fire hazard. When he asked Ren what was going on, Ren told him that it was e-commerce on Taobao (dianshang, 电商).
Ren explained that he and his family made costumes, put them on the computer, and sold them for money. Su was mystified—how do you put costumes on a computer? How do you then sell them online? After Su stormed off, Ren and his family were nervous that the local government would force them to shut their operation down.
Instead, after making some phone calls and asking higher-ups in bigger towns what Taobao was, Su came back to Ren with a proposition. Su thought that e-commerce could be a path for economic development in the village, and tasked Ren with teaching other villagers how to become e-commerce entrepreneurs.
The fear of getting shut down still lingers. Ren points to a MODEL BUSINESS UNIT plaque in his office. “For a long time, we paid a small fee to the local government for them to leave us alone. That was about it. We received no support from the government but at least they didn’t bother us. And one day, I hear a knock on the door. I see that it’s the local officials, and I think … Oh no. I really didn’t want to open the door, because we’re peasants, traditionally we don’t have great relationships with government … we really don’t want to get involved with government stuff, we’re not educated like government people. I ignore the knocks until someone knocks so hard that I think the door is going to fall off. When I open the door, they present me with this plaque, ‘Model Business Unit.’” Ren chuckles.
Ren is now the village party secretary, a government person himself. “I didn’t want to be village party secretary. It’s exhausting—there’s so much work. I still have to run the company as well as raise our kids and attend to village affairs. But the village voted me in. And they voted me in so I will try my best to do the job. My biggest priority is to make the village a better place to live.”
Which explains Ren’s all-out war on poplar trees. He’s convinced that the trees are taking up valuable arable land. With the influx of e-commerce money, the village can afford to plant lucrative cash crops and replace poplar trees with fruit trees. Ren says that the most popular cash crop in the village among the younger generation is chili peppers. Since the chilies require less land to farm, young farmers also make extra income by renting out their land. And while he finds this practice odd, since Shandong’s climate is not particularly amenable to chili growing, he doesn’t expect the younger generation to have the same attitude toward the environment that he has. He acknowledges that their relationship to farming is different.
When I get back to the United States, I search for Snow White costumes on Amazon. Drop-shippers are plentiful on Amazon these days—the business model has taken over much of Amazon, and American e-commerce. Unlike traditional shops, drop-shippers don’t keep anything in stock themselves, but order directly from a third party to have the item sent to a seller. The global reach of drop-shipping is born out of Alibaba and AliExpress, allowing drop-shipping entrepreneurs access to millions of items, shipped at low cost, directly from China. There are numerous online articles about how to start a profitable drop-shipping business, and many of these businesses are responsible for the deluge of Instagram ads that you see: lifestyle brands selling sleek water bottles, new travel bags, and suitcases. These items are often from AliExpress: drop-shippers simply provide the advertising and marketing.
After a few pages of scrolling, I find the costume that Ren makes, distinctive in the gold edging on the front triangle panel, a detail not in the cartoon Snow White’s original dress. It’s a difficult-to-explain feeling, but it’s like having a family member or friend become famous and seeing them in a movie—a disconnect in my personal perception of scale and distance. It feels like I am getting away with something. There’s a perversity about it, a brief flash of familiarity in a global economy that requires namelessness. It feels bizarre: a group of children trick-or-treating in suburban America is fueling the growth of fruit trees and chili peppers in Shandong, and also driving land rentals. The internet is tangibly reshaping Dinglou’s environment.
7.
There are a few things that clearly do not exist in Dinglou. Among them: Halloween, nature, family boundaries, and hard currency. Halloween is not celebrated in China, except for in some urban pockets of Beijing and Shanghai, and increasingly parents and the government alike are troubled by the Western, Christian connotations of Halloween. In Dinglou, Halloween is not a holiday but a time for extra work spent between the family workshop and harvest.
Nature is just as elusive. For urbanites across the world, nature exists as either a natural resource or a park to be conserved in imagined untamed beauty. Dinglou’s nature is ugly
and bare. It’s a force of its own. Each centimeter of Dinglou’s land has been planted or tilled, touched by humans in some way, including the dead. When villagers die, they are buried in the dusty yellow fields, graves marked by small stones, tucked in between plots of vegetables and wheat. While sustainable agriculture was practiced in China for thousands of years, the urbanization and industrialization of the 1980s pressured villagers to require more from their relationship to nature. Being a Taobao village has worsened this, creating added pollution and waste. A once complex relationship to nature has flattened and been diminished to cash cropping, the earth becoming factory, once rich soil becoming dirt.
The lack of family boundaries is what gave rise to Ren’s business. He’s since repaid his relatives for his initial RMB 1,400 loan. This type of intra-family lending is enormously popular across China, deemed “economic Confucianism” by some. Children are expected to be filial and pay for parental expenses, returning the hard work that parents put into raising them. Distant cousins in rural villages will ask wealthy city relatives for business startup funds. This type of payment and lending has become so common that the 2019 Chinese New Year’s Spring Festival Gala (an annual, widely watched TV event) began with a skit on sifangqian (私房钱), or one’s private money, and the hijinks of a husband and wife both sneakily sending money to family members via mobile payment. And as the government steps away from welfare structures and pensions, the family bank becomes ever more necessary to keep the elderly from sliding into poverty. In 2018, a widely circulated online survey by Toutiao, a popular news app, revealed that 54 percent of parents rely on their children to cover living expenses.
The family is central as an economic unit. And like any economy, the confluence of family and money creates drama. Rites of marriage and birth are emphasized as the way this economic network of family expands—rituals with their own growing pains. But for now, the government is banking on “traditional family values” to keep the family unit together, pushing an image of smiling, idealized heteronormativity across all forms of media.1