China "Would you like to try a piece?" Beekeeper Ma Gongzuo said as he looked into the phone camera, before tasting a piece of honeycomb that was molting gold.

The clip was shared for 737,000 Ma followers on the popular video-sharing application TikTok, which has 400 million users in the country. The application also turns a farmer like Ma into a "celebrity".

Video sales have become a popular business tactic for Chinese farmers, because videos can give consumers an increasingly lucid view of the product's origin and satisfy their curiosity about the game. rural life.

"Everyone told me it was useless to return," Ma, 31, told of his return to the village after an attempt to start an online fashion company, but failed. "They say we can only escape poverty if we study and get a job in the city," the 31-year-old added.

But now Ma is driving an expensive car, accumulating houses and property, helping parents and villagers by selling agricultural products via online video.

In 2015, Ma took over the production of honey at the beekeeping farm in the mountains of Zhejiang province. Thanks to the knowledge of e-commerce applications, Ma's annual revenue is about 1 million yuan (US $ 142,000). But the sales subsequently stalled. In November 2018, with the help of friends in the village, Ma began posting videos of his life on the farm.

Videos recorded Ma directly taking in a beehive surrounded by bees, naked in the river swimming or logging. "I never advertise my farm produce. I just filmed my daily life, the landscape of the countryside. That's what people like to see," Ma said. "But of course people also guess I'm selling honey. They contacted me and said they wanted to try some."

With the development of electronic payment applications, Ma easily transacted with customers. He sells about 2-3 million yuan ($ 285,000-430,000) of honey a year, dried sweet potatoes and brown sugar.

"When I was young, my family was very poor," Ma said. "At school, I admire my friends who have pocket money, because I have never had anything." Ma now drives a BMW car worth about $ 108,000 and invests in real estate. Ma admits using online video sharing is a turning point in his life.

"Today I can buy for my family what they need. I also help other farmers to sell their products. They all bring local economic benefits," Ma said.

China currently has about 847 million people accessing the Internet via smartphones, so online applications play an important role in the success of farmers like Ma. "It's an improvement," said Ma Gongzua's father, Ma Jianchun. He said that with the money his son made, he could renovate the house.

U.S. audit firm Deloitte thinks China is the world's most fertile market for live streaming videos. TikTok's parent company claims to have trained 26,000 farmers in the country on how to make sales videos. While Taobao, Alibaba's most popular Chinese e-commerce application launched a 2019 project to guide farmers to become MCs in their sales livestream program, helping them get rich.

According to Chinese government data, the number of people living below the poverty line in rural China decreased from 700 million in 1978 to 16.6 million in 2018. But many Chinese still flock to the cities to seek. jobs, with the expectation of higher pay.

"We want to make examples to show young people that it is possible to start a business and make money in rural areas," explained Ma Gongzuo, a university bachelor. "We hope more people will return to their homeland, to maintain their lives and economy in the villages."

Ma also said with his "popularity" on social media, he received many invitations to collaborate, not only from customers who like honey.