Yang Qi, a 52-year-old farmer in Yunzhou District, Datong City of Shanxi Province in north China, has got a new identity since May—an Internet marketing anchor.   

Invited to the broadcasting room of Battle Against Poverty, a live program jointly sponsored by the municipal government and CCTV-6, Yang worked with Li Jiaqi, a celebrity and Huang Xiaoming, a movie star, to promote sales of daylily products.  

This, 28 years ago, was completely unimaginable to Yang, who had to trek three times between Shanxi and Inner Mongolia in 1992’s autumn to sell out all 800 kg of daylilies.  

Yunzhou has a long history of planting daylilies, because of the suitable temperature and volcanic soil.   

“But people living in Datong were not good at marketing,” said An Yiping, Director of Yunzhou Daylily Industry Development Office. “Consumers barely know where the flower comes from, even though they buy it.” 

Therefore, farmers like Yang rode the wave of Datong’s online marketing campaign and walked into the broadcasting room for online promotion, bringing more attention to the Datong daylily. By the end of October, sales reached 10.8 million yuan ($1.63 million), up 540 percent compared with last year. 

“We did not dare to plant daylilies on a large scale in the past, and we didn’t have enough workers to pick them. The situation could get worse on rainy days as daylily fields would drown, so would farmers’ incomes,” said Yang. 

“Now we can well preserve picked daylilies while the flowers are still fresh with the cold storage facility.” 

Yang’s home Tangjiabao is an empty-nester village where most residents are seniors. The daylily blossoms only for a rather short period. The villagers thus are left with just a couple of days to pick the flowers before they wither. When the picking season comes, Yang hires young laborers as a quick fix for the labor shortage.  

Marketing is no easier than picking. While online commerce has enlarged the market for daylilies, how to keep consumers’ zeal is a Gordian knot for Yang. “Everything new fades,” said Yang.  

That the daylily demand soared within a short period could be attributed to the influence of celebrities and programs such as Battle Against Poverty, without which sales could start dropping.   

“The priority, therefore, is to make online commerce anchors out of our villagers, making known to audience the nuts and bolts of how we produce daylilies,” he said. To leverage the policy that supports online commerce, Yang hires young people as agents for trained anchors. 

“Young people are quick learners with sharp minds. Our daylily industry will become the best in China with a young team,” said Yang. 

Such confidence partly stems from support for the local e-commerce industry from the Yunzhou government, which has invested 20 million yuan ($3.02 million) to build e-commerce service facilities. Also, the government of Datong is planning to develop an industrial cluster comprising of daylily planting, processing, research and marketing.   

(Chen Lihui and Liu Yang contributed to this story)