This chapter aims to study the development of futuristic e-commerce systems in rural China. This chapter will explore the current situation of the whole industrial chain in rural small and medium enterprises and their developing trends in B2C model. Why are rural agricultural small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) developing rapidly in China? What is the digital context for the development of rural SMEs in the agricultural sector? What digital transformations have rural SMEs experienced in terms of business models, especially in less developed areas, such as Tier 4 and Tier 5 areas, compared with international ones? Compared with the previous rural e-commerce, what are the advantages of optimizing the new system? This chapter will use CiteSpace to perform statistical and correlation analysis on Chinese agricultural e-commerce system, including the Web of Science (WOS) database and CSSCI database. Cases from China will be used for comparison. This chapter will provide suggestions for the development of futuristic e-commerce system in emerging economies.
TopThe Current Situation Of Chinese E-Commerce
The annual GDP exceeded the trillion yuan for the first time in 2020, reaching 1,015,986 billion yuan. Among them, the value added of the primary industry accounted for 7.7% of GDP; the value added of the secondary industry accounted for 37.8% of GDP; and the value added of the tertiary industry accounted for the most, at 54.5%. GDP continued to rise in all quarters, and economic growth continued to recover faster in the first quarter of 2020 due to the impact of the epidemic GDP was 2,065.4 billion yuan, down 6.8% year-on-year from the previous period, but in the fourth quarter of 2020 China's economy continued to grow to 296,298 billion yuan, up 6.5% year-on-year. The three major industries achieved steady growth with similar growth rates. In 2021, the value added of the primary industry in GDP was 7.3%, the value added of the secondary industry was 39.4%, and the value added of the tertiary industry was 53.3%. Combined with the statistical chart, it can be seen that the proportion of the three industries changed as the tertiary industry was rising year by year, the proportion of the secondary industry was relatively stable, and the proportion of the primary industry had a trend of shrinking year by year (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Quarterly change in national GDP (billion yuan)
In 2020, about 24.9 percent of the total retail sales in China were made online, up from 20.7 percent in 2019. The share of e-commerce retail has steadily grown over the past seven years. E-commerce revenue forecast is expected to reach about 1,600 billion U.S. dollars on internet markets by segment in 2025 (Ministry Of Commerce Of The People’s Republic Of China, 2020).
In 2020, Chinese overall e-commerce transactions exceeded 37.2 trillion yuan, increasing from around 34.8 trillion yuan the year before (Zheng, Zhang, & Song, 2020). Rural online retail sales reached 1.79 trillion yuan, an increase of 8.9% year-on-year.