Dialoguepk

Feng Hao 24.05.2016 Online businesses could regenerate China’s rural economy and slow the drift to cities, writes Feng Hao Liu Dongdong, one of China's new rural e-commerce entrepreneurs, is pictured with boxes of red dates   The province of Shanxi, in northern China, is famous for coal mining and the industry’s impact is etched across the landscape. But the province’s southern counties, which lie near the Yellow River, are known for a very different commodity - red dates. 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 ar