Li Ke strongly pushed rural e-commerce to boost consumption.

At a time when consumption growth is unstable and downward pressure on the economy continues, Chinese officials have decided to speed up the development of rural e-commerce to boost consumption growth.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang chaired an executive meeting of the State Council on the 14th, calling for speeding up the development of rural e-commerce, expanding the application of e-commerce in agriculture and rural areas, and encouraging social capital, supply and marketing cooperatives and other main bodies to build agriculture-related e-commerce platforms.

This is the first time since the beginning of this year that Li Keqiang has made special arrangements for accelerating the development of rural e-commerce as a separate topic at the executive meeting of the State Council.

It is worth noting that since 2015, Chinese officials have frequently given "red packets" to rural e-commerce. After the State Council issued a document calling for the active development of rural e-commerce and strengthening the integrated development of the Internet and agriculture and rural areas, the Ministry of Commerce issued an action plan for "Internet + Circulation" in May. it is proposed to further improve the e-commerce infrastructure such as cable broadband and mobile network coverage and logistics distribution network to support the development of rural e-commerce service industry.

Officials pay more and more attention to the development of rural e-commerce, which is closely related to the current sluggish domestic demand.

After rebounding to a year-on-year high of 2 per cent in August, the monthly increase in consumer prices (CPI) fell back to the "1 era" in September, according to official data. Although the year-on-year growth rate of consumption in August was 0.3 percentage points higher than that of the previous month, the foundation for the rebound was not solid. As Lin Tao, a senior statistician in the Department of Trade and Foreign Economics of China's National Bureau of Statistics, said, the rebound in consumption growth is related to the rise in retail prices and is not entirely due to the rebound in consumption. If the price factor is deducted, the real growth rate of retail sales of consumer goods in August is the same as that of the previous month.

Under such circumstances, the executive meeting called for speeding up the development of rural e-commerce, which will become a move to promote consumption and expand domestic demand.

As of 2014, the nominal growth rate of retail sales of consumer goods in rural China has exceeded that of urban areas for three consecutive years. Zhao Ping, deputy director of the Consumer economy Research Department of the Research Institute of the Ministry of Commerce, pointed out to reporters that the rapid growth of rural consumption has a significant pulling effect on the overall consumption growth. "in the current economic growth slowdown, in order to give full play to the role of consumption in boosting economic growth, it is necessary to stabilize rural consumption."

And e-commerce is precisely a bright spot of rural consumption. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, as of December 2014, the number of online shopping users in rural China was 77.14 million, with an annual growth rate of 40.6 percent. In the same period, the online shopping utilization rate of rural netizens was 43.2 percent, an increase of 12.1 percent over the previous year.

The Ali Research Institute predicts that the size of the national rural online shopping market is expected to grow to 460 billion yuan (RMB, the same below) by 2016, becoming a new growth point of the market.

Zhao Ping said that rural e-commerce talent is much more willing to accept new products than first-and second-tier cities, and rural areas are also more willing to accept e-commerce than urban areas. In view of this, strengthening the development of rural e-commerce will be more conducive to stimulating consumption and stabilizing economic growth.

The countryside is not only a big market for buyers of e-commerce, but also has great sales potential. In recent years, Taobao Village, where the annual transaction volume of e-commerce is more than 100 million yuan, is constantly emerging, and more and more farmers begin to open up markets with the help of the Internet to sell their agricultural products to the whole country. Qingyan Liu Village, Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, which is known as the "first Village of online Shop", originally had more than 1400 villagers. In 2014, it opened more than 1800 Taobao online stores, accommodating more than 8000 jobs, and the online turnover reached 800 million yuan as early as 2013.

There is no doubt that e-commerce plays a "multiplier" role in increasing farmers' income and promoting rural economic development, which will also pave the way for the stable and healthy development of China's economy.