（Source: "People's Daily Overseas Edition" 2026-03-02）

On March 2, Qu Qixing, a researcher at the National Institute for Opening up and a professor at the w88 casino of International Business and Economics at the w88 casino, was interviewed by a reporter from the People’s Daily. He expressed his views on “livestreaming e-commerce to help ‘small businesses’ break into the big world.” The relevant article was published in the “Expert Interpretation” column of the “Foreign Media Views on China” section of the “People’s Daily Overseas Edition”. The following is the content of the article.

A few days ago, the American "Wired" magazine noticed that Donghai County, Lianyungang City, Jiangsu Province, a small county that was unknown a few decades ago, now dominates a global industry worth billions of dollars with an "all-weather live broadcast army" and has become the "Crystal Capital" of China and even the world.

Jiangsu Donghai is a microcosm of China’s county specialty industries going global. Hanfu, buttons, wigs, handmade armor... At present, many county-level specialty industries in China are emerging on the world stage with their unique advantages.

In Donghai, Jiangsu, crystal has become the "top trend" in cross-border e-commerce live broadcast rooms; in Xuchang, Henan, the wig industry has attracted beauty lovers from all over the world; in Caoxian, Shandong, Hanfu merchants customize oriental elegance for overseas consumers... Today, "small businesses" in many counties in China are relying on industrial clusters and increasingly perfect e-commerce infrastructure to carve out a world in the global market.

Live streaming e-commerce has pressed the "fast forward button" for China's counties to integrate into economic globalization. It breaks the traditional model of products relying on stalls and exhibition promotions, and connects scattered transactions into a high-frequency, visible, and timely feedback distribution system. A mature live broadcast room is no longer a personal show of the anchor, but a "production line" covering product selection, content, streaming, customer service, and warehouse distribution coordination. Compared with offline distribution, the real-time feedback brought by live broadcast allows the production side to more keenly capture changes in aesthetic trends in overseas markets, and promote faster iteration of product processing, design, and packaging. A style that becomes popular on overseas social media in the morning may enter the proofing process of a factory in a certain county in China in the afternoon. This kind of "screen-to-screen" real-time link allows China's county-level specialty industries to truly achieve "zero-time difference" interaction with the global market.

A good business never depends only on traffic, but also on deep "internal strength". At present, the focus of China's county-level specialty industries is shifting from early traffic expansion to the construction of deeper capabilities. With the continued expansion of cross-border e-commerce platforms such as TikTok Shop, China's county industry development is facing new opportunities.

In the next step, if “small businesses” in various counties want to break into the wider world and improve their competitiveness in the international market, they can also make efforts in the following aspects——

First of all, we must lay a solid foundation for trust, and standardization is the key. Judging from the practice of cross-border e-commerce, merchants need to establish a complete system covering quality grading, authoritative testing, full traceability and worry-free after-sales, so that every product comes with its own "quality certification." The clearer the rules and the more complete the service, the more disputes can be reduced and customers can win long-term trust and repeat purchases.

Secondly, in order to gain more favor for the product, brand upgrading is an important starting point. China's county-level specialty industries should deeply explore local unique cultural stories, craft heritage and aesthetic styles, and continue to shape their brand image to global consumers through multi-dimensional scenarios such as cross-border e-commerce platforms, social media and offline tourism experiences, and realize the transformation from "selling processing" to "selling brand", and from "fighting price" to "fighting value".

Finally, to do a systematic upgrade, it is essential to make good use of intelligent means. Digital and AI tools can help companies more efficiently complete complex links such as overseas market research, product selection analysis, intelligent production scheduling, multilingual customer service communication, and logistics and cost optimization, making cross-border operations in specialty industries more accurate, efficient, and controllable.

The success of cross-border live streaming e-commerce has never been just about short-term traffic boom, but about transforming the industrial capabilities accumulated over many years into trust, efficiency and brand value. This may be the common password for "small businesses" to go global.

(Expert interviewed: Qu Qixing, researcher at the National Institute for Opening up, w88 casino, professor at the w88 casino of International Economics and w88)

(Compiled from interviews with Chen Zihan and Yan Yu)

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