(Chinese Version)

300 kilometers away from the Guiyang airport sits Li Ping county’s Tongguan village, a small remote village in the mountains populated by the Tong ethnic group. The inconvenient transportation condition makes this remote village even more isolated from the outside world. It usually requires the villagers and people elsewhere to go all the way through mountain paths to reach the village. Even experienced drivers that rely on providing short-distance tour services around Guiyang are rather unfamiliar with Tongguan village due to the fact that few tourists know this place, let alone hiring them to go there.

However, Tongguan village has become very lively recently. In the Tongguan Minority Museum built in 2014, scholars, government officials, media outlets, and representatives from companies have gathered together as observers. The song of Tong minority has been sung again and again. But this time, the performance is streaming live through the mobile Internet to the world.

In a small Chinese village in which the villagers only have an annual income of less then 5,000 RMB, a mobile Internet experiment has already been on for 6 years and it’s still continuing. Perhaps in no time, this peaceful village will become something more because of that. However, what are people most concerned about is the future impact on the situation where the Internet meets villages. Can an experiment that has been on for 6 years change the future landscape of Chinese villages in the next 60 years?

The entry of the mobile Internet

On August 19th after the sunset, unlike the usual tranquility-drowns-all scene, all the villagers came out of their homes after dinner and went to the recently built museum. In this summer night, a beautiful Tong music performance would be presented to the crowd in the museum. Even the villagers were curious about this performance organized by city residents from the outside world. Excitement and curiosity filled the air of that very night.

The performance brought the lively noise that the village had been always short on to the streets before the museum, even making it seem like a shopping area. Standing at the crossroad of this “shopping area”, Wu Changcan, who was in his middle age, then relaxed himself on a chair. Instead of enjoying the performance, Wu appeared to be more interested in the passing pedestrians. Behind him was a newly furnished two-storeyed western mansion, stretching out like a sore thumb among the wooden Tong-ethnic-style houses around it. The mansion’s structure seemed to be in line with the wood house structure of Tong buildings but the house in fact was constructed with bricks. “Such combination will be the very example of what most houses here will look like in the future,” Wu explained to our journalist, grinning. “Such houses are comfortable to live in and preserve the very characteristics of Tong ethnic as well.”

“I will start my own business here, in my home.” Wu stated in the end.

As the tourism industry booms in Tongguan, prosperity also comes along, making people like Wu who have been working hard in other regions come back to their very hometown to start their own business. Now, more and more tourists are coming to visit the village and therefore the tea villagers plant in their yard can be sold at a higher price. Although Wu himself didn’t really understand the reason behind these changes, he had faith and trust in Chen Yuanyuan and this openness she had brought forth anyway. Half of the middle age migrant workers like Wu have come back to Tongguan village. Years of working in other regions has exhausted them.

The very Chen Yuanyuan we have just mentioned above is actually the director of Tencent Foundation’s branch in Tongguan village. Six years ago, together with her team, Chen came to Tongguan village with the hope of saving the vanishing Tong ethnic music. But what Chen didn’t expect was that an Internet + Village experiment was started after their arrival.

This experiment went at a low speed that’s beyond imagination. In a remote village, there wasn’t much material support and there wasn’t much money to begin with either. The beginning wasn’t assuring, and the villagers didn’t take it well.

According to statistics, 90% of Liping county’s young labor force was out working in other regions, the olds and children were left in their home. In their mind, going to big cities and find jobs there was the only way out. And the greatest achievement they could ever get was come back to the village and build a house after making a fortune outside. The Internet that Chen Yuanyuan had brought to the village appeared to be unrealistic. The villagers thought they might as well just gave them money to build houses instead. Some villagers even considered them as a fraud and Chen’s true intention was to take away their lands.

At first they provided free courses on the mobile Internet for the villagers, but their efforts turned out to be in vain. Half of the participants left even before the course got started. To get the villagers to use smart phones and the mobile Internet, Tencent convinced telecom carriers and smart phone makers to give out funds in hardware. They set up base stations and sent smart phones. At that time, any villager that passed the courses could pay a 200 RMB guarantee deposit to get a smart phone. However, 5 out of 10 villagers quitted in the first course. 2 out of the 5 remaining villagers then regretted and quitted as well after giving the guarantee deposit. In the end, only three illiterate female villagers took the smart phones.

The lack of adequate infrastructures in the remote village made it incredibly hard for the Internet to grow. To prepare the villagers for future e-commerce opportunities, Chen’s team wanted to introduce WeChat payment to them. But the cold reality once again crashed them: the nearest bank was several kilometers away and the village also faced logistics and transportation issues.

Becoming connected

What really broke the ice was the fundamental need to use smart phones. To be able to video-chat with her young son who’s working in Guangdong province, the 65-year-old Wu Peishan took the initiative to learn to use a smart phone. In order to save data flow, she even learned to use Wi-Fi in the stores in the villages.

It’s a rigid need for villagers to connect with their beloved ones in distance.

As smart phones and the Internet swept through Tongguan village, the village committee of Tongguan then opened a group chat on WeChat which the 130 families in the village all joined. Cadres in the village and the project organizers were also in the group chat, observing. Thanks to this group chat, villagers were given the chance to voice their concern and worries easily to the cadres. And their complaints were indeed responded. For instance, the assessment of low-income families that enjoyed a minimum living guarantee was determined by the cadres in the village. Sometimes the villagers found it unfair since they suspected the authenticity of the results. “It’s like the cadre election. The outcome was not decided by our votes,” said some villager. In a poor village, everybody needs that 2580 subsidy fund. That’s why the village committee decided to post its assessment standard and procedures publicly on the group chat. Villagers could voice their opinions about the result and the cadres would therefore be able to make better and fairer and more satisfying decision. Everybody’s happy in this case.

The appearance of the WeChat group chat in some way pushed the democratic process of Tongguan village. This was in fact a turning point for the fact that villagers had grown to trust and rely on the Internet, making them expect more from the Internet.

“I have never thought that the dowry I made for my daughter could worth so much,” Wu Dingzhi, a female villager said, while going through stuffs to find remaining fabrics and making new products. Due to the sophisticated production, these fabrics were made by the women in the village out of boredom are now favored by fashion designers. Now they have even been put into mass production and made into merchandise. The pillowslips in the guest rooms of the museum were also from the hands of the women in the village.

The 5600 square-meter museum is of the Tong ethnic aesthetics and filled with the artworks from the hands of Tong people. The museum is built of and decorated with materials that Tong people commonly use, from construction materials, architecture style, to crash pillowslips in the guest rooms, hand-made cotton towels, and decorative fabrics on beds, everything possesses the mark of Tong minority.

At present, products from Tong people, such as Tong black tea, white tea, Queshe tea, and hand-made towels, are all rolled to an online store with professional packaging. These merchandise all have a fairly high price: 158 RMB for two packs of tea, about 40 RMB for a small hand-made towel. Though relatively more expensive than the market price, they are actually quite popular among consumers. During 2013 and 2014, the sales volume of these products even reached 1.5 million RMB. In the future, Tong pillowslips, rice and tea oil will be available to consumers as well.

Recently, a cultural travel package has become available for booking on a WeChat official account called Tongguan Village. Its activities include birdcage making, Tong embroidery and straw sandal making course, and hand-made cloth course etc. The everyday labor of the Tong people has been packaged and geared to cater to tourists as tourism products. Each activity has been priced at around 100 RMB. These business opportunities brought by the Internet directly increased participated villagers’ income. Farmers that pick tea leaves in the field, for example, can get a bonus of 500 RMB. Bands that sing Tong music also get a fixed income every month and some extra cash according to the total number of their performances. Other works including rice planting and managing the museum also have a salary based on the revenue. As the reputation of Tong music grows larger, the revenue generated by the museum will also be given to support the development of the community.

The experiment is near the end, and a revolution is under its way. It's time for Tencent to leave the scene.

Which village will be the next Tongguan?

Apparently, Tongguan village is not going to be just a vanity project for the local government.

Three years ago, the director of the Tencent Foundation once asked Chen Yuanyuan two questions: how can we quit this project, and which village will be our next project?

Three years later, Tencent’s service platform Weicun, which was specially designed for thousands of villages in China similar to Tongguan, came online. Tencent announced for the very first time that it would transform from a pure financial supporter to a business incubator. The network provider that designed the booking platform for the Tongguan museum, the design team that made the agricultural product packaging, the architects that built the museum etc. are all offering service on Weicun with a marked price.

The next group of “Tongguan villages” will have a brand new model. Qin Yuefei, the village official of Baiyun village in Hunan province as well as an overseas returnee, just received a VC fund from Tencent Foundation on condition that he must use half of the fund to subscribe Tencent’s resource bundle on its platform. Tencent hopes to use resource bundles to replicate the success of Tongguan village.

However, the biggest payer in the future will be the government. “Some villages can get funds from Tencent or other VC organizations, while some might rely on the government’s e-commerce supporting policy to make purchasing. This also provides references for the government to consider before purchasing software services.” Chen Yuanyuan added. Charity can’t last forever.

Since 2015, the Chinese government has made encouraging the young generation to return to the countryside and start a business there a national-level strategy. In June this year the state council introduced the State Council’s Suggestions On Accelerating Innovation And The Development Of Urban Areas, which suggests to improve the infrastructures and service system for entrepreneurs, improve infrastructure services and the building of online and offline infrastructures for Internet entrepreneurship, and utilize existing resources to optimize the development of urban areas and encourage the young generation to return to their home and start their business etc.

Supported by policies, the urban market will no doubt attract more experimenters like Tencent. The moment Tencent launched Weicun, Alibaba also hosted a Taobao urban alliance conference in Linan, Zhejiang province. Unlike Tencent who used social networking as an entry point to penetrate the urban market, Alibaba’s Urban Taobao tried to make a group of villages rich through e-commerce model. As the market grows more saturate day by day, however, Taobao’s platform is actually declining, signifying that the Taobao model has already reached the bottleneck. So, could Tencent’s model become the universal model of Internet + villages?

“Tongguan’s model is unique. For instance, its minority group, culture, local specialties, supporting policies, and the 6-year efforts made by Tencent were all indispensable part of Tongguan’s success,” Ma Qiji, researcher of the marketing and communication of new media research center in Peking University said, “But the truth is, other villages might not possess such advantages.”

“Tencent’s Weicun platform doesn’t aim to make another Tongguan village,” Ma believed that what Tencent was really planning was enable different villages to utilize the resources provided on the platform and make use of their own advantages to have a unique development path that could set them apart from the crowd. This method helps Tencent filter villages and make those that have the potential to succeed and emerge from the crowd.

However, to most Chinese villages, Tencent’s model also has a flaw that’s hard to come by: the lack of talents. The Internet + villages model needs talented people with ideas and bravery or daring local governments to carry out. It needs talented and capable people to team up with Weicun and work together. Only in this way can Tencent’s model stimulates the development of the urban areas in China. But the question remains: what if a village lacks such conditions?

Additionally, from the perspective of industry insiders, it’s hard to tell if the government will be willing to invest in such projects. So far, more successful cases are needed to make a better conclusion.

[The article is published and edited with authorization from the author @ITtimes, please note source and hyperlink when reproduce.]

Translated by Garrett Lee (Senior Translator at ECHO), working for TMTpost.