Editor's note: The Sichuan-Tibet Plateau, a beautiful region that reaches toward the heavens, is a place showered with blue skies, covered in white clouds, and dotted with snow-covered mountains, but recently, something truly remarkable has been materializing among the households that call this place home. A groundbreaking historic change has been reshaping the land and its people. From today on, we will publish a series of stories to tell you those changes. 

In the following months, Liu Ziqian visited various villages and towns, talked with people in collective pastures and yak-raising households, and reached several yak-supply agreements. In the evening, he would go back to his slaughter house and supervise the slaughtering and processing of yaks in order to guarantee a high product quality. On top of this, various county departments, including the Department of Industry and Commerce and the Department of Quality Supervision, carried out on-site quarantine inspections and attached related qualification labels on acceptable products. Liu could then smile in comfort when he saw packages of frozen fresh yak meat being loaded on freezer vans and shipped out from processing plants.

Liu Ziqian came to see how special e-commerce could really be. He never thought that his company would be able to occupy the entire Mianyang City yak-meat market. Next year he would like to enter the Chengdu market together with Changmei.

Dedan, the village director of Chaka Village, also believes that e-commerce is amazingly beneficial. Yaks used to be unmarketable in the past, but now, they are all the rage. With profits being distributed to poverty-stricken households, more and more people in the village have begun to wear new clothes, build new houses, and go shopping. Today, the vitality found throughout Chaka Village has shot through the roof, and it really does seem as if poverty is not far from being a thing of the past.

County Deputy Head Dai Shengli is yet another person who believes in the remarkable value of e-commerce. Thanks to the Internet, the asymmetry of information has been broken down, fresh yak meat from Rangtang County has successfully reached the dining tables of urban clientele, and the problem with dull yak export sales (which has plagued Rangtang County for many years)has finally been solved. Every 3,000 heads sold through Changmei’s e-commerce platform each year can provide a per-capita increase of 500 yuan (77 USD) to 30,000 county herdsmen. It is now laying a solid foundation for the cause of overcoming poverty and striving for relatively comfortable livelihoods. Mr. Dai has even accepted an invitation from Changmei Company to make a television commercial at Mianyang Television Station as a spokesman for Rangtang yaks, and the man has become recognized as the representative of a county famous for its yaks.

Even the Office of Supporting Tibetan-Inhabited Areas in Mianyang City has expressed that e-commerce is utterly amazing! It has decided to give a three million yuan (461,396 USD) investment toward e-commerce to promote future poverty relief efforts, create e-commerce platforms for superior featured products, construct display centers, and improve the logistics system for the village, town, and county levels so that locally featured products may be sold in larger quantities and at a wider range. 

The Chinese version of this story is written by Li Dayong, Jia Yonghe, Yang Jing,& Lan Xin and translated into English by Huang Wenjuan. And the story is sourced from the United Front Work Deparment of the Communist Party of China (CPC)Sichuan Provincial Committee.

Editor: Ana Wu