Alibaba partners with Communist Party group to teach teens rural ecommerce

Communist Youth League volunteers wade across a flooded area in rural China (promotional)

Strengthening ecommerce in rural areas has been one of Alibaba’s goals for years now in helping to expand its domestic market. Now, Chinese official state media outlet Xinhua announces, the company has a new partner in that venture: the Communist Youth League.

According to Xinhua, Alibaba will work with the Communist Youth League to train one million teenagers on how to bring ecommerce into rural areas. Funding will also be available; Alibaba financial arm Ant Financial has set aside US$154 million to “support” college grads who want to return to their rural hometowns and set up ecommerce businesses. (It’s not clear whether that money will distributed in loans, grants, or some combination of the two).

In cities, there is increasingly strong demand for clean, fresh-from-the-farm foodstuffs

45 percent of China’s population – some 600 million people – still live in the countryside, and ecommerce has spread there far slower than it has in China’s cities. There are a number of reasons including logistical challenges (some rural locations are difficult to ship to) and lower computer and internet usage rates. At present, in many Chinese villages “ecommerce” is a physical shop you can go to set up by an ecommerce company (like Alibaba or JD) that will help you buy and sell products online without needing internet access, your own epayment account, or any real computer literacy.

Alibaba’s new partnership with the Communist Youth League will be hoping to help spread knowledge and understanding of ecommerce in these lower-adoption areas while also encouraging rural people to open ecommerce shops of their own. In cities, there is increasingly strong demand for clean, fresh-from-the-farm foodstuffs, and that’s an area where many ecommerce providers are hoping to expand their offerings.

(The Communist Youth League, for those who aren’t already aware, is an official youth movement that’s administered by China’s Communist Party. Historically, members of the CYL have gone on to achieve high positions in the Communist Party itself, with notable examples being recent President Hu Jintao and beloved Party chairman Hu Yaobang, whose death in 1989 was the spark that led to the Tiananmen Square protests).