“I’m promoting my hometown, and Wutong taro is on the market!” On September 21, seizing the opportunity of China’s Farmers’ Harvest Festival, Wutong Town brought its team of village livestreamers directly to the fields, setting up a mobile broadcast studio to showcase and sell Wutong taro. With smartphones becoming the new farm tool and livestreaming the new farming skill, the town has developed the “Wutong Village Stream” brand, using digital e-commerce as a bridge to help more specialty agricultural products catch a ride on the internet expressway, opening up new channels for returning youth, stay-at-home women, and local farmers to find work and boost their income right at their doorstep.

Nurturing talent to unlock new job skills

In the past, specialty products from Wutong Town, like taro, passion fruit, and osmanthus, relied on middlemen coming to buy them at the farm gate, leaving farmers with little room to negotiate prices. This forced many young and middle-aged people to seek work elsewhere, leaving stay-at-home women and idle labor in the village with no way to increase their earnings. To tackle this employment and income challenge, Wutong Town proactively built a platform and focused on developing local talent, bringing e-commerce skills training directly to the people. The village streamers regularly attend free public e-commerce training classes, using a model that combines classroom theory, hands-on field practice, and one-on-one mentorship. They learn the complete range of skills, from on-camera presentation and short video editing to online store operations, with full support throughout the entire process. To date, the town has cultivated over 120 village livestreamers, ranging in age from their 20s to their 70s, and has attracted more than 30 young people who had left for work in other cities to return home and start their own businesses, carving out entirely new career paths. At the same time, over 70 of the most promising streamers have been recommended for provincial-level training programs for rural industry revitalization leaders and e-commerce experts, where they systematically improve their livestream operations and brand-building capabilities. A team of instructor-livestreamers has also been formed, turning former students into teachers who travel to other counties for cross-regional exchanges and knowledge sharing, creating a cycle of learning advanced skills elsewhere and bringing those skills back home for the benefit of the whole community.

Extending the industrial chain to create more diverse jobs

Village livestreaming is about much more than just selling products during a broadcast. Wutong Town is continuously improving the full e-commerce supply chain for its agricultural products, generating a wide range of job and entrepreneurship opportunities across multiple levels. Relying on the strength of its village stream brand, the town has built stable sales channels, connecting local farmers who supply passion fruit, young ginger, and other specialty products directly to buyers, which has solved problems of unsold inventory. Many villagers have seized the moment to transform their businesses, moving from traditional farming and breeding into specialty retail. For example, the “Brother Xi and Sister Xi” couple voluntarily shut down their livestock farm to focus on selling Wutong’s local specialties, opening a store and expanding their customer base. A 50-year-old local woman known as “Sister Bean Paste” has used the livestream’s popularity to market her handmade bean paste, seeing sales increase by nearly 50 percent, creating a win-win situation where traditional crafts meet digital commerce. The town is also nurturing its own local streaming teams. A rural mom named Li Meimei sells taro through her livestreams, with produce from over 1,000 acres going directly to online orders, shipped as far away as other provinces and even South Korea. With a strong commitment to benefiting local farmers, the planting base provides steady jobs for 30 local villagers who handle ridging, mulching, harvesting, sorting, and loading. These workers earn income both from renting out their land and from their wages, capturing value across the entire production chain. In total, the Wutong Village Stream initiative has helped more than 300 local residents find employment near their homes, allowing them to keep their farms and families intact while steadily increasing their income, effectively easing the problems of rural depopulation and labor drain.

Focusing on local specialties to build a stable, long-term foundation for income growth

The Wutong Village Stream team digs deep into local resources, creating distinct livestream events for different products to continuously expand their online market presence. The town has pooled the agricultural resources of all its villages to form a unified promotion network, solving the problems of individual farmers working alone with too little online traffic. Specialty livestream events like the “Rose Myrtle Special,” “Red Sprout Young Ginger,” and “Wutong Taro” have continually gained popularity, steadily raising the profile of the brand. So far, online sales of agricultural products through Wutong Village Stream have surpassed 7 million yuan, with this online momentum flowing back to support local farming and breeding, creating stable employment in the process. In September 2026, after a short video was posted announcing a need for “100 people to harvest osmanthus,” more than 100 villagers gathered at the Guilin Flower Specialty Forestry Demonstration Zone by 4 a.m. the next day, racing against the blooming season to collect the flowers. Working in an orderly fashion, they spread tarpaulins, shook the branches, sorted the blossoms, and processed them in the workshop, all while earning a flexible income close to home. This online-driven demand has boosted offline employment, with one of the village streamers, “Sister Mali,” now selling osmanthus products through her livestreams, creating a complete employment loop that runs from picking flowers in the field, to processing them in the workshop, to selling them online. Looking ahead, Wutong Town will continue to strengthen the Wutong Village Stream brand, improve its e-commerce incubation facilities, and offer more advanced training. It will also upgrade logistics and warehousing networks across the town’s villages to lower the cost of shipping agricultural products, while extending the deep-processing supply chains for osmanthus and taro to create even more jobs for people right in their own hometowns.