Nostalgia of Outsiders and Taobao Dream of Seven-level Buddha--A visit to Taobao Village of Guizhou E-commerce

*Note: Taobao villages refer to villages where the number of active online stores reaches more than 10% of the number of local households, or the annual e-commerce transaction volume reaches more than 10 million yuan. They will be named and listed as Taobao villages by Alibaba. In 2013, Ali released 20 Taobao villages in China, and by 2021, the number of Taobao villages has reached 7,023.

Escape from the breath of crowds and complex urban feelings, to the more peaceful and simple countryside in impression or imagination. I'm almost politically incorrect in wanting to enjoy binary difference, with what Yifu Duan calls an "escapism" inclination, the countryside (somewhere that symbolizes nature) is always a respite home. In fact, I never cared about its potholes and dilapidated houses, and did not correspond to the symbols of poverty and backwardness. It simply sees the countryside as an existence in contrast to the urban situation, such as the self-sufficiency of nothing else, the transcendent silence, and the promise of another time.

Before visiting Libei Village, I collected available statistics, village conditions, and captured the landscape on Google Earth.

1. Libei Village, Yongjing Town, Xifeng County, Guiyang City, is about 7 kilometers from the village committee to the county seat, and about 68 kilometers from the provincial capital Guiyang Municipal Government.

2. It is located in the Central Guizhou Economic Zone (an important economic zone for the Western Development) established by the State Council in 2010, which is the heartland of the southwest region. 3. The industrial enterprises in the economic zone have a good foundation and occupy an important strategic position in the province's productivity layout.

4. Libei Village was established as one of the “Hundred Villages Pilots” in Guizhou in 2006. Based on the local transportation advantages, it guided the villagers to develop the transportation industry, developed farmhouses for the Xifeng Concentration Camp Revolutionary History Memorial Hall, and built a pillar industry (off-season). Vegetable bases and other planting industries), and began to specialize in breeding.

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Like a positivist, I can provide evidence and analyze how a village can rely on a good geographical location, a solid industrial foundation, multi-level land and informatization policy support, and heroic leaders to develop e-commerce, and finally grow into a large scale To be named Taobao Village. But none of these rationales have anything to do with my feelings.

Taobao Village is something that I and some friends in the city have never cared about. I don’t think I have had the chance to meet each other with Taobao Village, sellers, not to mention sellers in Taobao Village, and there will be no intersection in real life. They are beyond my vision.

If this is not limited to a task-based visit, if it is not a search for curiosity, and it is not an identification of differences, if life is not imagined elsewhere (rural), but found elsewhere, then it should be out of a paradox desire for self-discovery. It requires me to get rid of that arrogant affirmation of "as I imagined," where the question itself defines the answer, the search that begins with a conclusion, a poor product. It even asked me to avoid turning things into problems and getting into a cage of contradictory and hypocritical solutions. A Taobao buyer, or a young man who lives in the city and has a higher education, in this unfamiliar environment, are all possible positions that I do not experience purely with knowledge.

The former site of Xifeng Concentration Camp is more than 700 meters away from Libei Village Committee. It used to be the largest and highest-level secret prison set up by the Kuomintang Military Bureau during the Anti-Japanese War. It was built in 1938 and evacuated in 1946. It once detained more than 1,000 people including Xu Xiaoxuan, Xiaoluotou and Ma Yinchu who were transported from all over the country. In 1997, it was officially opened to the public as the Xifeng Concentration Camp Revolutionary History Memorial Hall. After opening up red tourism, Libei Village guided every household to become an inn.

After being included in Taobao Village at the end of 2017, "Guizhou Taobao No. 1 Village" quickly became the endorsement of Libei Village, marking the village and setting off the "post-production" of Taobao Village. According to the villagers, since being listed in Taobao Village, the facades of the village houses have been painted with uniform tiles. The houses near the village head have been replaced by inns into demonstration sites of the industrial park. The village logo at the entrance is also new and outdated, implying that the villagers can make a living through the Internet as a symbol of progress (technical, economical), and the reputation has overshadowed the old symbol. I don't know which of the monuments will appear in their minds when people in Libei Village think of the name of the village decades later.

The main road in Libei Village is a cement road, which is spacious and flat, and you can see vehicles coming and going, including taxis. The Tai Chi symbols on the iron gate of the old factory building, the unfinished building, the huge driving school, and the hotel named after "Manor" all seem to emerge from it, and postmodern collages are in this village.

Finding a Taobao household in Taobao Village is not as good as picking up mustards. We asked along the way and were shown the way. Finally found out...

It is a hotel. Inside lived the family of the former village party secretary. In 2015, the former village party secretary and the village cadres who graduated from Tsinghua University together mobilized young people to return to their hometowns to do Taobao. Libei Village became an e-commerce demonstration village in Guizhou Province in 2015, and he resigned in 2016. He said the current elected village committees are not capable enough.

"If I were to do it, I would use the business card of 'Taobao Village' and go outside to get resources. Let more people get involved and make this Taobao Village live up to its name. Now Taobao Village is not real, saying that the first Taobao Village is like Brag, there are still many villages in Guizhou that are engaged in e-commerce, but not on Taobao.”

"The poorer the city, the more urbanization", Lin Shusen, the former governor of Guizhou, called in 2010. This sentence is inexplicably exciting, perhaps because it means that, with the strength of the vector leading to the future, we are striving to get rid of the past. pace. Even in the city, we witness the tumultuous transformation, the thumping sound of the wall, the discarded old furniture and construction waste, the commercial districts that rise up, and the built "business card" can be heard and seen everywhere. It’s just that I am always easy to disappear in this gradient, because far from the countryside, the changes in the countryside seem to be magnified, which is a rare feeling in the city.

The chaotic earth curve in memory, the ever-changing winding and detours... Now the countryside seems to be no different from the city, except for the vast land and sparsely populated. I seem to have a kind of nostalgia of an outsider for the beautiful and even overly romantic imagination of the countryside, the nostalgia for this passing away, and the feeling of wanting something to stay. And the passionate attitude of "I will use the name card of Taobao Village..." and "the poorer it is, the more modern it is", makes me feel that only an outsider like me can have this kind of affection.

On the later trip, on the way back from Daba Village, we met an old grandmother. Grandma's house is built on the side of the road, she is the only one in the family, and the child works in Hangzhou. Very few young people stay in the village. "All that is left are idlers who have nothing to do." I heard this from an old villager before, and it seems that those who have aspirations should leave the village. There are few young people in the village who are willing to stay here, just as few young people go to the village, at most they are patrons. We set up the camera. Grandma put on her colorful costume and stood in front of the house. The villagers next to her yelled at Grandma, "You're going to be on TV!" Grandma smiled shyly and faced the camera upright. The booing villager waited and watched for a while, then ran home to "go on TV" with the bright costume she wore when she was dancing.

When we asked her for her address and wanted to send her a photo, she didn't know her address, so she showed us her ID card and told us that there are many liars who deceive the elderly now, but she doesn't do this when most people come (entertainment).

She said she felt we were not liars.

On the other end of the computer, I was shopping for agricultural products, and I pressed the sales ranking button. The pictures on the page show farmers picking fruits in orchards, some holding fruits in one hand and ID cards in the other, and some showing a child sitting next to a huge fruit. I can't feel if these are true or false, only based on sales rankings and reviews. Simmel once talked about the generation of money, which facilitated life and transactions, but then derived a "new, highly anonymous modern life", where producers and customers are no longer familiar with each other, and everything is left to the market, and now even the market The buyers and sellers are no longer familiar with each other. The name and reality of our ups and downs in this era are shrouded in the produced position, "trust", "ranking" and "people's choice".

A family in Libei Village painted the words "Taobao Partner" with red paint on the brick wall along the street, along with their name and phone number. But there is no sign of employment. It seems that the merchants on the e-commerce map set up at the head of the village are also difficult to correspond to.

But the newness of this Taobao Village reminds me of Beishan Village in Zhejiang Province. It is the first batch of Taobao villages (2013) to be included in Alibaba's income, and is described as a successful case of the "Beishan Model". On the day of the visit, the Taobao mascot was lying in the field, the e-commerce map that was almost ineffective was displayed at the head of the village, and the advertisements that had been on CCTV many times were also dimmed. The big Taobao households moved to the industrial park in the town, and there are very few small Taobao households. The cold weather that day aggravated its depression and silence, as if a gust of wind had swept away a certain atmosphere, leaving only a few fragments of Taobao Village, like a forgotten and desolate place.

Near the head of the village, the old aunt we asked spoke only Guizhou dialect. She said that she did not know the specifics of Taobao, so she had to ask the young people. She described to us the function of the e-commerce service center in the village in her eyes, saying that there are When the order comes, I will help to pack it and send it to Taobao. Taobao in her mouth is still a specific place.

As we walked along the way, Libei Village gradually expanded, and there seemed to be few signs of Taobao households. "From 2015 to 2017, the momentum was the most powerful. Some became successful, and some slowly collapsed. When they collapsed, they went out to work and open a store." I remember what the former village party secretary said.

Hearing the harsh chirp, we followed the sound and guessed that it was a Taobao household.

The three compartments on the first floor are interconnected and open to the street. The first room has a sofa, a coffee table, and a simple office area. A little brother who is younger than us is sitting in front of the computer, working as customer service, while printing the stickers on the packaging bags. In the second room, an aunt from a mother's age was surrounded by a pile of boxes and was packing, and the sound of chirps came from here. The innermost room is for storage.

Young children saw us and climbed off the sofa to give us their seats. The first serves as a living room. His mother, in her early 30s, wears light makeup, fair complexion, and a well-groomed pair of glasses. He can speak fluent Mandarin and has the enthusiasm of Guizhou people. He moved a chair and sat opposite us.

"It's better to run around outside than Taobao at home."

A slogan at the head of Taobao Village depicts the Huang couple returning home. She told us that it turned out that she was in the clothing business in Guangdong. In 15 years, because her elderly father was ill, she returned to her hometown to work on Taobao. Before coming back 15 years ago, I had already explored Taobao stores and skipped the basic training organized by the village. The "Guiyang Street Snack Bar" currently in operation is an 8-year-old shop with four blue crowns.

When she first returned to her hometown, she bought clothes from Guangdong and sold them through online stores. Then found that it didn't work, adjusted the product and began to sell local specialties (folded ear roots, etc.). Later, it was discovered that folded ear roots were also being sold in Hubei, and the neighboring county only had a large area of folded ear roots. After they began to sell them online, the price was lowered and it was almost no longer profitable. They had to adjust the supply, so they searched almost all the manufacturers in Guizhou Province. Later, I found out that everyone is Guizhou snacks, no, we need to be "differentiated" and have "brand awareness", so the little brother in front of the computer is printing the brand stickers they just launched.

Our conversation was constantly overwhelmed and interrupted by the ripping of packing tape next door. As she chatted with us, she closed the door.

She said that what was on the sofa just now was her doll, and sometimes there were multiple dolls here.

"Actually, we have a shop and we have to raise a lot of adults and dolls at the same time!"

Her elder sister also came to help her. Last year, her younger sister also came back. They are not producing now, only selling. The plan is to start producing a product that sells well so it can "create a few more jobs and bring more relatives in".

Their shops are the kind of "made up" in the village.

"It's not very good, let's do it, it can only be regarded as the low level of our level." Brother Huang looked even more rude. He leaned on the chair in the office area and said that all Taobao merchants are at various levels, like playing games. To upgrade slowly. Last year, he paid a tuition fee of 35,000 yuan and participated in a one-week training in an e-commerce college in Shenzhen. This is more than the three-year tuition fee for a master's degree at the Academy of Fine Arts. As for whether it is worth it, he told us frankly:

"You go to a university, how much is it worth? It's hard to assess. It's just to recharge your beliefs. You see so many people (teachers in e-commerce schools) doing well, and you will believe that they can sell well. You You will be very convinced and cheer for yourself. Because successful people are already ahead. You didn’t know you could spend (money) like this, and you didn’t know the effect. After you go, you find that you can still do this (spend money to use Taobao’s If you lose money, you will feel it’s worth it!” He uses Taobao’s through train service every month, which is a marketing tool for product promotion and pay-per-click.

Guizhou specialty net red snack spicy potato chips spicy potato shreds potato chips crispy snacks potato chips bag

Chili noodles super spicy super spicy devil barbecue spicy super fine Guizhou Sichuan Shaanxi Qin pepper oil spicy powder specialty

Guizhou specialty roasting pot barbecue spiced chili noodles dry dish dipping sauce spicy super spicy dipping water barbecue chili powder 500g

Guizhou Bijie specialty super spicy spicy spiced chili noodles barbecue pan dipping sauce extra spicy dry dish chili powder 1 catties

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Type "Guizhou Specialties" in the Taobao search box, and pictures of similar products and a series of long and unreadable product titles appear. These titles sometimes contain several words that do not seem to be related to the products, such as Guizhou Specialties. XXXXX Yunnan. As a Taobao buyer, I don't know why these seemingly indistinguishable items are ranked first, and in fact, the seller can't know for sure.

The order of these on the page is determined by the "weight" of Taobao's background, that is, according to the data and a certain formula ratio, the seller and the commodity are ranked. element. The actions of sellers such as writing titles, posting babies, and decorating stores will not directly produce weights. They can only rely on accumulating data of buyers' operations, such as store dsr scores, single product click-through rate, dwell time, collection, conversion rate...

These elements can be viewed in the data analysis plugin "Business Advisor" for all sellers. Every move a buyer makes on the page will be recorded and counted, becoming competitive intelligence for "business advisors". According to the different payment standards of "Business Advisor", the data level and public opinion that can be seen are also different. All sellers can use the free version, use the "market conditions" inside to search for keywords, and study the search popularity of each word.

So in the 30 words of the product description, each word is the entrance for sellers to strive for buyer traffic:

1. Guizhou specialty net red snack spicy potato chips spicy potato shredded potato chips crispy small snacks potato chips bag

2. Chili noodles super spicy and extra spicy devil barbecue spicy extra fine Guizhou, Sichuan, Shaanxi, Qin pepper, oil and spicy powder specialties

3. Guizhou specialty roasting pot barbecue spiced chili noodles dry dish dipping sauce spicy super spicy dipping water barbecue chili powder 500g

4. Guizhou Bijie specialty super spicy spicy spiced chili noodles barbecue pan dipping sauce extra spicy dry dish chili powder 1 catties

...

It is the same "data war room" that provides them with public opinion and competitive intelligence—the business advisor.

"If you earn 1 million a year, 400,000 may be given to Taobao. The pure profit is 1 million for you, and 400,000 for Ma Yun's father is too much. But, a master may only need 200,000. This is a dare It's a matter of not using your own money. A lot of people are afraid."

He said that in his eyes, how much money is no longer valid for him. "We all look at the ratio and the conversion rate. If there is an analysis master, he will be very sensitive to these data, grab a lot of things, and have judgment. We have not yet reached this level. And not only can analyze, You still have to be able to practice, and you have to be able to afford it! Practice returns the information, and then adjusts it.” As for how to analyze these data, Brother Huang replied: “It is uncertain, it does not mean that there is a formula, and 100 people operate 100 kinds of answers. . To try, you have to trial and error."

Therefore, if he wants to recruit a pusher, he will not ask the other party's educational background. It won't work for him if he is from Tsinghua University. He will first ask how much money has been spent on the other party's hands. He seemed more experienced. "If he spends the previous company going out of business, I want this person! Hahaha! Experienced."

Mrs. Huang smiled graciously on the side, and added to us more calmly: "These still require skills."

When we talked about "swiping orders", Brother Huang was a little displeased with the name, "It depends on what you call it, we don't call it swiping orders. The thing is worth 50 yuan, I will send it to you, do you want it? Send it there. , a few thousand orders a day, it depends on whether you can afford the loss! I didn't play it, but I know how to play it. If you give me 100 million, you will lose 20 million to play! The more you lose, the more you may earn later. the more.”

That tearing sound has been acting as background noise.

"Has there been any explosions in the store?"

"What is an explosive model? There are 10,000 singles in 1,000 single-family homes, and there are more than 10,000 orders. It can only be said that you are on your level.

level achievable (sales range). "

Brother Huang said that there are indeed many channels now. If they receive more resources, the store will not only be like this (at the current level). "For some teams, Taobao Live has written the script, and everything you want to say is arranged for you." "Some WeChat groups we can't get in at all, high-end, you are doing these every day, maybe it is People are programming, what are you playing with them?"

We are curious about the "affordable" that Brother Huang repeatedly mentioned, and his answer was also unexpected. "Can afford" is not only related to himself:

"You see how high he stands, you calculate his cost, his sales, you see if you can keep up with him (that is, you can afford it). Taobao's level, the monthly sales of the sixth level is 600,000. , we won't be able to reach it, and the traffic it gets is different from what you are in Tier 5. The highest level is Tier 7, and I'm in Tier 5. That's how the rules of the game are written anyway."

"To achieve level 7, there must be at least 30 million (sales) a year."

"This is the highest level. They say "seven-level confused (Buddha)"! Maybe it's a martial arts secret! Hahahaha! I'll take my time."

I could label him "brainwashed successfully" and leave those statements behind. At the same time, my distinction is also unaware. My indescribable sorrow as an outsider, mixed with this nostalgia for the dream of the "homeland" (where it came from, the side), the Taobao dream of the "seven-level pagoda" they salvaged, the dream of the city, success and the like The sorrow in the pursuit of (where to go) is the same lack and limitation.

In Big Brother Huang's WeChat avatar, the background is champagne-colored wallpaper. He wears parted hair with waxed hair, wears a black woolen coat, and sits on a European-style sofa. He often shares his little dreams and worries in the circle of friends:

"Ask me what kind of car is expensive, only the through train is expensive"

"In the last month of 2018, 330,000 ended 2019 and refueled because the car I like is very expensive, and the house I like can't afford it"

After returning from each visit, when I return to the "Taobao Village" in my memory, there is that kind of tearing sound in my ears, and the remaining light slices overlap layer by layer: the old concentration camp site, "One Village One Product", the e-square at the head of the village... To each village, we were like "too late". I don't know, in the memory I mentioned before, what is the specific reference to what I want to leave behind, and what is the specific reference to what has passed away. Its past seems more elusive than its future.