For 20 years, Lyu Chengjun has run an electronic weighing scale business in Yiwu, a city in East China's Zhejiang province known as "the world's capital of small commodities". Along with the transformation of the city itself, his business has grown big, with more than 200,000 items exported each year to Africa, the Middle East, South America and other regions.

Regarding the development of his company, Constant Scale, Lyu, 50, said that for him, innovation is constant. "By innovating products to increase their added value, we gain a competitive edge in the international market, which is beneficial for long-term development."

Lyu said that he actively employs new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, to analyze data on the differentiated needs of foreign clients, allowing his company's products to better align with the demand for weighing scales in the global market.

"Actually, innovation is the driving force that propelled Yiwu to become what it is today," he said.

Lyu is one of thousands of businesspeople in Yiwu, a county-level city, who dream big and build up businesses step by step, even from the smallest and seemingly insignificant commodities such as buttons.

Once hindered by poor transportation links and scarce resources, Yiwu has written a remarkable chapter in China's county-level economic development since the opening of its first-generation small commodities market in 1982.

Today, the Yiwu International Trade Market is home to more than 1.26 million business entities, and it maintains trade connections with more than 230 countries and regions.

In 2025, its export value reached 730.7 billion yuan ($108 billion), ranking first among all county-level regions in China.

In an instruction that was made public in April, President Xi Jinping called for efforts to further review and make better use of the "Yiwu development experience", which is marked by enterprising spirit, persistent innovation and the ability to "create something from nothing".

Yiwu's small commodities have entered a vast market and developed into a major industry, forming the "Yiwu development experience", Xi said, adding that this represents a successful example of developing county economies in line with local conditions.

Yiwu's commercial life began with peddlers who traded sugar for chicken feathers for use as fertilizer, and with roadside stalls that slowly grew into a vast marketplace.

Over the past four decades, the Yiwu market has been relocated six times, expanded 13 times, and undergone five rounds of transformation and upgrading. Now it spans more than 8 million square meters, with over 80,000 shops and daily foot traffic of more than 210,000 people. It is often seen as a window into China's reform and opening-up and a barometer of the global small-commodities trade.

Xi's ties with Yiwu go back many years. In December 2002, shortly after taking office as Party secretary of Zhejiang province, he visited the Yiwu International Trade Market for an inspection.

In the following years, while working in Zhejiang, he made several inspection trips there, and came to see Yiwu's experience as instructive for the development of county-level cities across the province.

In the mid-2000s, Yiwu was outgrowing its administrative framework. Its economy, market reach and international links had expanded far beyond those of an ordinary county-level city, while services related to customs, inspection, foreign exchange, taxation and financing still lagged behind its needs.

Xi captured the mismatch with a vivid metaphor: A fast-growing child needs a larger piece of clothing.

In an instruction he made in November 2005, Xi called for efforts to remove institutional barriers ranging from financing and registration of foreign trade enterprises to tax policies.

A year later, Zhejiang issued guidelines on piloting local government administrative reforms, delegating Yiwu a total of 131 economic and social management powers — the first county-level city in the country to enjoy such broad authorization.

On June 8, 2006, Xi held a symposium in Yiwu on promoting the "Yiwu development experience". He hailed Yiwu's rise, saying it had "turned stone into gold".

When Xi returned to the Yiwu International Trade Market in 2023 for an inspection tour as China's top leader, he commended Yiwu's development based on small commodities, saying that it was truly remarkable that the city had reached where it was.

Zhang Jiying, who owns an umbrella brand called Real Star in the Yiwu International Trade Market, started her business in 1997 with a stall covering barely one square meter. The umbrella-making skills her father had honed for years have turned into a business that sells about 5 million umbrellas a year, with her customers spanning more than 170 countries and regions.

Zhang said that her shop was among those that Xi had visited during his inspection tour in 2023, and she showed her umbrellas to him.

"President Xi said that it was great for Yiwu to have made such achievements, and everyone is a participant, a builder and a contributor," she recalled. "His words encouraged us a lot."

After Yiwu launched digital tools including the Chinagoods AI services platform in 2023, Zhang began using large language models to generate product videos in multiple languages, helping her reach more overseas buyers.

Zhang said that she would keep building her business around quality and innovation, selling better products to wider global markets.

Stories like Zhang's show the strength of a market that has grown from the ground up. But Yiwu's rise has also revealed what it can do best based on local conditions, while the government acts swiftly to create an enabling environment.

Raj Kumar Khadka, a Nepali trader and the honorary trade representative of the Nepal Chamber of Commerce in East China, said that while running a business in Yiwu for 14 years, he has witnessed the development of the Yiwu market.

His first visit to Yiwu took place in 2002, when the market was far less developed. Over time, he watched the city fill in the gaps, building its market, logistics and supply chains into a more efficient link to global trade, Khadka said.

Yiwu's growth has come from the steady interplay of market forces and proactive government, he added.

As of June, Yiwu boasts over 11,700 foreign-funded business entities from more than 160 countries and regions across six continents, according to local market regulation authorities.