I found this article at chinadialogue on rural eCommerce thought-provoking:
In 2015, a slump in the market for red dates (known in Chinese as jujubes) became big news in China. In Yonghe County, over 40 million jin (20,000 tonnes) of dates were harvested, but only half were sold around Chinese New Year, the county’s busiest shopping period.
Upon hearing the news, Liu Dongdong, a Yonghe native and then university graduate working at a building and decorating firm in the provincial capital of Taiyuan, thought of Taobao, China’s eBay with around 500 million users.
What if people could sell the remaining dates online? Instead of farmers waiting for customers to find them, they could deliver directly to customers’ homes. Liu Dongdong returned home that night with dreams of opening his own online business.
A major impediment, of course, is the lack of rural Internet. In the U. S. rural Internet penetration is around 42%. In China it’s less than 30% and, based on the statistics cited in the article, rural broadband penetration might be as low as 1%.
Another big problem is likely to be literacy. Not just computer literacy but literacy literacy. You’ve got to take China’s official literacy figures of more than 95% with a grain of salt. They define literacy differently for different people, depending on their “station in life”. For rural farmers, the ability to recognize a handful of characters might be enough. Sounds like a real opportunity for the computer-savvy.
But imagine if, rather than being (sometimes literally) herded into big cities, rural Chinese people could earn decent incomes through eCommerce. China’s “ghost cities” which bank on continuing migration from the countryside could remain uninhabited. China’s rural population remains in the hundred of billions. There are more rural Chinese than there Americans living anywhere.
Increasing a rural Chinese family’s income to $1,500 per person from $500 per person per year would do more to make China prosperous than increasing the incomes of China’s educated urban elite to European standards.
The real story here might be networks. In the 19th century the meaningful networks were the railway system, the telegraph lines, and canals. In the 20th century we had highways and telephone lines. I strongly suspect that the most important networks in the 21st century will be telecommunications networks and the power grid.
If you want to make worthwhile investments in infrastructure, think networks. That’s as true for the United States as for China.
Also, consider the implications of unmanned drone aircraft, from tiny on up, guided by a nationwide wireless system, carrying products from rural areas to far away customers.
