Hengzhang is a traditional ancient village located in Songyang County, Lishui City, Zhejiang Province. In 2013, Zhang Junjie quit the job he had at the time and returned to his hometown to become a beekeeper in this mountain village.

With the advancement of the Internet economy in recent years, Zhang and his team have tried to integrate the products of their business into it by using short videos, livestreaming, and other popular marketing methods to introduce his village life to the world. While operating their beekeeping business, they also sell the village’s agricultural products to customers around the country.

Zhang Junjie harvesting honey.

Return to Pastoral Life

The villagers keep alive ancient methods of beekeeping, and the honey produced, palatable and rich in nutrients, also looks very beautiful. Due to the lack of outlets to sell these products, this high-quality honey was only sold locally in the past and could not be distributed to the large markets outside the mountains.

Zhang started learning the ancestral methods of beekeeping from the elders of the village and later began designing ways to expand sales.

To reach more customers, Zhang began by posting pictures and videos of local honey and the beautiful surrounding landscape on WeChat every day. This quickly attracted the attention of his friends living in other regions, and his sales went from a few bottles to more than 50 a day. However, honey is only consumed in small doses and his farm soon faced a lack of outlets.

In 2018, Zhang noticed the rise in popularity of TikTok and so he tried posting short videos of his life as a beekeeper in the small mountain village on the TikTok platform.

Since then, Zhang has continued to post daily videos portraying the simple life of the villagers and the rural activities they carry out in their daily lives. These appealing scenes of rural life bring back to many netizens memories of their hometowns. Soon Zhang had fans all over the country and orders for honey poured in. The daily sales of his honey on the TikTok platform have reached 500 bottles. Later, he expanded the variety of his products to include dried sweet potatoes, red bayberries, potatoes, dried bamboo shoots, and mountain green tea grown in his community, delivering them to customers living outside the mountains by express couriers. The villagers were as happy as children. This is when Zhang started e-commerce on TikTok. Little by little, he expanded his staff to 20 people. The members are all young people who used to work outside the village but now have returned home to work together.

Spokesperson for Rural Products

Since his childhood, Zhang has lived with his grandmother, who has always been the most important person in his life. Zhang features her in many videos. Fans love to see them work together. In 2019, a video which showed them packing dried sweet potatoes was viewed more than 20 million times. That evening, they sold 15,000 kilograms in less than six hours, making nearly RMB 700,000. In 2019, his annual sales of agricultural products through the livestreaming platform reached RMB 15 million. His TikTok account now has over two million followers.

Even Zhang himself can't believe that with a mobile phone and entrepreneurial enthusiasm, he can make a career out of working in a remote mountain village. His parents, relatives, and friends did not understand at first why he returned to the village to become a farmer after having a decent job in an urban area. But thanks to the young people like him who have returned and those who have embarked on entrepreneurship, the village has regained dynamism and hope, and the elderly are now smiling.

According to statistics, there were more than 17 million online rural stores in 2022, about a third of which are e-commerce and livestreaming businesses like Zhang’s. Agricultural products can now be sold to a wider market with more intense competition. Only by establishing a complete standardized process from planting to processing, and from sales to transportation, will operators of these online stores be able to gain the trust of customers by offering them a line of products that have relatively uniform quality and a fantastic taste. Today, they have gone beyond mere entrepreneurs to become spokespersons for rural consumer brands.

Inspiring People beyond His Village

When people see Zhang on TikTok, he always has a smile on his face. Even when he gets stung by a bee in front of the camera, he manages to keep a smile on his face. In fact, the lives of rural beekeepers are not always as idyllic as they appear to be in videos. After Zhang returned to the village to learn the trade of beekeeping, he had to run into the mountains every day regardless of the weather conditions to inspect hives in locations scattered throughout the mountainous region. But regardless of the difficulties of raising bees, whenever he looks at the golden pieces of comb honey in his hands during the honey harvest season, Zhang feels that all the effort he expended was worthwhile.

As a spokesperson for rural agricultural products, Zhang believes that he carries many responsibilities on his shoulders and that there are many people to help.

His followers often leave messages inviting him to go help market gardeners, fruit growers, and grain farmers all over the country sell their products that are unsellable due to a lack of marketing channels. Therefore, Zhang is making plans to visit various rural areas soon and help more people in need sell their products via livestreaming. He also calls on other successful livestreamers in the agricultural sector to do the same.

Zhang hopes that they can attract more creators to talk about the origin of their agricultural products and generate more traffic and content online. E-commerce platforms are only pivots, and rural residents must be able to create their own mode of autonomous development. In addition to this, they should make more efforts to attract the young people who have left their homes to return and make the countryside a favored place to start their own businesses.