Agricultural entrepreneurs from across the province bring local food and try to sell their products via livestream at the contest's launch ceremony. [Photo/zj.zjol.com.cn]

At the launch ceremony, Wu Xiaobo, a famous Zhejiang-raised financial writer, became the official endorser of the province's initiative to promote commercial livestreaming in the agriculture sector. Wu said that livestreaming can eliminate much of the hassle involved in selling and further the deep processing of agricultural products, injecting new life into traditional farming.

Another speaker on site, Zhu Xi, is in charge of running a rural program on Taobao Live, the livestreaming unit of Alibaba. "So far our platform has bred 90,000 rural livestreamers, and this number grew nearly 50 percent over the past three months," Zhu said.

In April, Alibaba and local authorities jointly opened a full-time training center in Quzhou, Zhejiang province to train local farmers how to live stream. This is the first time Alibaba has established such a training center.

"Douyin has seen explosive growth in agriculture-related content," said Zhang Yuanling, a media worker at ByteDance (the company that owns Douyin and TikTok). Zhang revealed that the number of agriculture-related content creators with over 10,000 fans had soared more than six fold between July 2019 and July 2020. The company announced a new plan to provide publicity and guidance for these content creators on Aug 4.

 "Zhejiang hopes this contest will promote rural entrepreneurs and agricultural goods," Zhang said optimistically.