In September, at the PowerChina Smart City Industrial Park in Xiongan New Area, Hebei, electric bikes were parked one after another outside the office building, spilling onto the sidewalk, turning the corner, and disappearing from view. From time to time, young people rode up from a distance, parked, and walked into the building. Inside, keyboards clicked without pause. The line in the cafeteria was long at noon, and restaurants at the street corner were full of young people wearing Pinduoduo work badges. A new tea shop opened downstairs, and across the street was a gym with a 100-yuan monthly pass and new equipment. Four months earlier, the area around this office building had been deserted, with not a single electric bike in sight. Then Pinduoduo arrived, and 5,000 people followed.

From "a small squad" to 5,000 people

Huaiying is one of the people who watched the office building go "from empty to full." "When we first came to Xiongan, we actually didn't even have office space. We only confirmed it after we arrived." That was at the end of May this year, when Pinduoduo's Xiongan company had just been registered. Huaiying was one of the first employees to arrive in Xiongan. After graduating in 2021, he joined Pinduoduo and rotated through Beijing, Ningxia, Nanjing, and Guangzhou, working in Duoduo Maicai and also in cross-border e-commerce. This spring, he saw an internal notice saying that Xiongan was going to set up a new department and was recruiting preparation staff, so he volunteered. A former soldier, he likes challenges and had always felt an inexplicable fondness for Xiongan. When he first arrived in Xiongan, "there were just about ten people, like a small squad in the military." There was no venue, so they looked for office space on the spot. There was no recruitment system, so they built one. During that period, they threw themselves into hiring, with almost all interviews conducted online. Headquarters also mobilized almost all HR staff across the country to assist with recruitment in Xiongan. On June 15, the first batch of 150 new employees joined. After that, new people came in every week. Huaiying remembers that in July and August, every few days another row of new faces appeared in the office. By late September, the total number of employees exceeded 5,000, and the annual target for the special recruitment plan was completed ahead of schedule. It had originally been a one-year goal, and it was achieved in less than four months. On September 23, the employee scale of Pinduoduo's Xiongan company surpassed 5,000. The Xiongan team hired heavily among local residents and employees from Hebei. At the same time, it also brought in managers and key staff from different cities with internet experience. A number of industry "veterans" entered management and core business roles, using experience accumulated in the past to lead a new team. Locals provided stability, while veterans provided methods. After registration, Pinduoduo quickly finalized its Xiongan office building. On July 12, the new office building was officially put into use, and in early August, an employee-only cafeteria also opened. Staff growth was so fast that the space could not hold everyone, so another office venue was rented nearby. In Xiongan New Area, no private enterprise had previously landed at such speed and recruited people on such a scale. The first ten or so people who arrived are now managers of various business lines. Before coming to Xiongan, Huaiying had led a group of at most 40-plus people, but now he manages a team of 110. During recruitment, one interviewee asked him whether the company would develop in Xiongan for the long term and whether it might one day just leave. His answer was direct: "We have already bought a building here. What reason would we have not to develop here for the long term?"

A counterintuitive choice to "build in-house"

People arrived, but what were they doing? The answer contains a choice that runs opposite to industry convention. Xing Lianghuo is one of the people executing that choice. In June this year, he joined Pinduoduo and came to Xiongan. He currently leads a 230-person merchant admission review team. Merchants who want to enter Pinduoduo need to submit a business license and operating qualifications for different categories. Food and medicine have their own permits; some special business categories have even more detailed requirements. Xing Lianghuo and his team guard the first gate. He has worked in review and compliance for many years at Didi, ByteDance, and Tencent, and is one of the few people in the industry who has truly gone through the entire chain. "Most companies in the industry hand review operations to outsourcing teams, or hand the whole thing to algorithms." He said that in places such as Hainan, Sichuan, Xi'an, Dalian, and Nantong, large numbers of call centers and review outsourcing bases have long been distributed. Outsourcing has lower operating costs and can adjust labor scale more flexibly. Algorithms are fast and even cheaper. Pinduoduo has not rejected algorithms. The advertising creative review that Huaiying is responsible for also goes through algorithmic screening first. Obvious prohibited words and violating images can be directly blocked by the first layer of machine review; anything the machine cannot determine is then transferred to humans. New cases found by humans are then fed back to the model for continued training and optimization. But beyond algorithms, Pinduoduo concentrated a large amount of review and labeling business from its main site in Xiongan, choosing to recruit people itself and build its own team, with all employees signing formal contracts and receiving full contributions to the five social insurances and one housing fund. Hiring formal employees is much more "expensive" than using outsourcing and relying on algorithms. This looks like a counterintuitive choice. The industry is cutting costs, while it is adding people; peers are outsourcing, while it is building in-house; other companies rely on machines, while it still keeps humans. Pinduoduo's Xiongan company held training for new employees. In the outsourcing process Xing Lianghuo was once familiar with, when a front-line reviewer found an anomaly, it often had to be reported level by level to outsourcing managers, then passed to the person responsible for outsourcing business coordination, and only then could it reach the internal department that actually set business rules. "The whole process is very long, with many links, and low efficiency." After building its own team, reviewers can directly connect with internal business and product departments. When a new problem appears, the feedback chain is clearly shortened, and more importantly, so is experience. The longer a person works, the more fake certificates, anomalous cases, and rule boundaries they have seen, and the more stable their judgment becomes. In Xing Lianghuo's team, preliminary reviewers handle about 1,000 orders per day, at least half of which must be reviewed again to ensure accuracy. What is truly valuable is not how many orders were handled on a given day, but that these cases continuously accumulate within the team. In Xing Lianghuo's view, platform governance is a long-term matter that requires accumulated experience. "It is not short-term emergency control. We are willing to rely on a stable in-house team to continuously build admission standards and verification mechanisms, and protect the platform's ecosystem health from the source." From June this year to now, the platform has successively launched 106 special governance measures, covering key areas such as product admission, food safety, drug safety, qualification review, advertising governance, intellectual property protection, false marketing rectification, livestream e-commerce standards, and prevention of technology abuse. The implementation of these measures depends on this group of people in Xiongan.

5,000 people enter the core of the platform

Recruiting 5,000 people does not mean a company has truly landed. People must enter the business. The first thing Jin Wangshu does every day after opening her computer is enter the labeling platform. Born in 1998, she is from Anxin County in Xiongan. She studied digital media art in university, and after graduation worked in exhibition planning and new media operations in Baoding and Shijiazhuang. She joined Pinduoduo this summer. She is now involved in the "fitting mirror" project, which tries to solve a problem almost everyone who buys clothes online has encountered: the picture looks good, but what will it look like when worn on oneself? Based on a product image, the system generates try-on effects for models with different body types, such as slim, normal, slightly chubby, and full-figured. Jin Wangshu needs to judge one by one: whether the effect is reasonable, whether there are visual glitches, and whether the details are correct. "For example, if a model is wearing a dress and also has pants underneath, that is unreasonable and must be sent back to be redone." These judgments ultimately become training data. When she was in university, Jin Wangshu did something similar. At that time, afraid that clothes would not fit, she would piece together her own photo and the product image just to get a rough sense of how it looked. Years later, this small private habit became an algorithm project. "Fitting mirror" is only a small part of Pinduoduo's Xiongan business. At present, the Xiongan company is building around two directions: a traditional industry data processing service center and a comprehensive service center for high-quality development of traditional manufacturing. The fitting mirror project that Jin Wangshu participates in belongs to the traditional industry data processing service center. This center has already established two major databases, algorithmic labeling and model labeling, covering business scenarios such as search and recommendation experience optimization and image-to-video labeling training. The fitting mirror is its latest application landing. At present, the function is in grayscale testing on the App and is open to a small group of users. Huaiying's team is responsible for advertising creative review and merchant services, in the comprehensive service center for high-quality development of traditional manufacturing. In plain terms, advertising creative review is doing "advertising quality inspection" for merchants. After a product enters the platform, it first has to pass their check. Whether the promotional image looks good, whether the copy violates rules, and whether efficacy claims have supporting evidence all must be reviewed. Merchant services mainly intervene to handle appeals after problems arise in merchants' operations. "As long as it relates to merchants' legitimate operating rights and interests, we handle it, and we solve it the same day," Huaiying said. On Xing Lianghuo's side is the first gate of the platform ecosystem. What kind of merchants can join Pinduoduo? What qualifications must be submitted? Are the licenses real? Are there missing qualifications for special categories? All of this will be governed more precisely after landing in the Xiongan company. Preliminary reviewers handle about 1,000 orders per day, at least half of which must be reviewed again to ensure accuracy. At present, the comprehensive service center for high-quality development of traditional manufacturing has formed a comprehensive service system covering "governance, quality inspection, compliance, and after-sales," including merchant and product admission, content quality review, advertising governance, and security compliance review. The three groups do different things with different coverage, yet they form a complete closed loop. Data labeling helps the platform "see more accurately," advertising review helps the platform "present better," and merchant admission helps ensure that "what comes in has no problems."

More and more young people are coming to Xiongan

After graduating from university, Jin Wangshu left Anxin. She came back last year because her family wanted her to return, and also because she felt Xiongan was becoming more and more different. This summer, the news of Pinduoduo hiring stirred all of Xiongan. Before that, no private enterprise of this size had landed in the new city. A friend sent her a WeChat message asking whether she wanted to sign up too; her parents also sent her the recruitment link and told her to take a look. She submitted her resume and successfully joined. In July, Pinduoduo's Xiongan office building was already in use. Her commute is a ten-minute walk, and after work she can still go home and eat food made by her parents. When she was previously in Shijiazhuang, just taking the subway took an hour. When she has time, she meets friends to play badminton in a park near her home, or goes to the newly built library. "Living support facilities are all improving. Modern stadiums, libraries, and various intelligent facilities mean that you can see new changes in the city almost every month." This was an experience she did not have in Shijiazhuang and Baoding. "After Pinduoduo came, I see more and more young people on the road," Jin Wangshu said. In the morning when she goes out, she can run into colleagues who greet her; when she takes a walk at night, there are more people in the park; when she orders takeout, new merchants appear every day. Xing Lianghuo, from Daqing, has lived in first-tier cities for many years. He said that for the same living needs, Xiongan's costs are lower than other cities and commutes are shorter than in other cities, and the time and money saved are very real. He is still exploring the city: what the streets are like, what parks there are, and whether there are scenic spots. He plans to settle into work first, then bring his family over and settle here. "If a friend asks me whether they can come, I will answer: Xiongan New Area is great, and Pinduoduo here is great too. Come quickly." Huaiying is from Xianyang, Shaanxi, and came here on his own initiative. He once lived in Guangzhou for several years, renting near the company for 3,000 yuan a month. In Xiongan, he rents a two-bedroom apartment a five-minute walk from the company for only 1,000 yuan a month. "Compared with Guangzhou, Xiongan is newer and is in a stage of vigorous growth." After living in Xiongan for several months, he feels that Xiongan is "developing rapidly and living is convenient." Not long ago, HR sent out a batch of internal referral quotas, not many in number, and Huaiying received more than 50 resumes in two days. That number reminded him that there were still more people outside who wanted to get in. He did not think carefully about what was behind the number, but Jin Wangshu knew. Among the people she knows, three or five classmates have already returned to Xiongan one after another and joined Pinduoduo. There are also people who came back from Beijing; hearing there were opportunities here, they came back. In the past, young people in Xiongan were used to running outward, to Beijing, to Tianjin. Now some have begun to look back. When Jin Wangshu was in high school, news of the construction of Xiongan New Area arrived, and what she and her classmates discussed was whether this knowledge point would appear in the college entrance exam. At that time, her most concrete impression of "Xiongan" was the farmland and grasslands around her home, which then became construction sites. Now, electric bikes are parking downstairs one by one, the gym has opened, and new takeout merchants go online every day. A new city is being filled up by specific people.