Wearing Bai costumes and a sweet smile, Ms. Ma Lingmin is a "post-1995" girl from west Yunnan’s Dali prefecture, and she is nicknamed "Yunnan Xiaohua/little flower" on the Taobao online market place. 

In 2019, Ma Lingmin, together with her young team members, toured around more than 30 villages in the remote areas of Yunnan, helping local farmers sell hundreds of tons of fruits and vegetables.

Xiaohua used to be a kindergarten teacher. In the summer of 2018, when an accident fell on her mother, she resigned and took care of her mum. During her stay at home, a cousin told her that the Taobao live stream for rural areas was popular.

Thinking of the variety of green food in Yunnan, Ma decided to try live broadcasting in the villages, so that Yunnan produces can be sold to more.

"Village anchor" is one of the new jobs born on the Taobao network under Alibaba. Via a smart phone, the rural anchor can present produces in the mountains to consumers. While tasting the food for the buyer, Ma also helps local farmers in online marketing.

Among the agro-produces in Yunnan, Ma and the team members often chose to promote fruits that are really sweet, good and favored on Taobao.

To make a difference in her live stream, Ma has showed her special skill in peeling fruits, winning numerous likes from young consumers. She can even get a 3-cm skin strip by peeling a tomato as small as a finger tip. And she is good at squeezing the juice with her own hands, drawing attention from tens of thousands online.

Ma mostly conducts live broadcasts outdoors, going deep into the mountains, poking the honeycomb, picking fruits on the tree... Many netizens said Ma’s shows feature a "taste of nature", and they can almost feel the freshness of the fruit. 

Over the past year, the mileage of Ma Lingmin’s tours has added up to around 10,000 kilometers and her team visited more than 30 remote villages in Yunnan. Their car has worn out.

In November 2019, Ma came to Shede Village in south Yunnan’s Honghe Hani and Yi Autonomous Prefecture, helping villagers sell the local specialty of ginger. 

Affected by the on-going Covid-19 pandemic, Yunnan flowers didn’t sell well at the beginning of this year. "After the picking period, the flowers will soon fade, and farmers will suffer from economic loss," said Ma.

Throughout March, Ma lived on a flower field in Yuanmou County, central Yunnan’s Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture. To invite in more fans, she joined hands with another online celebrity "Pomegranate Brother," in an effort to help the flower farmers.

"Though there are dark clouds in the sky, the sunshine still prevails above them.” In the gloomy days against the epidemic, Ma's showed optimism to Yunnan farmers, and the radiance on her face has brightened their path-way for a while.

On the Taobao video-sharing platform, the number of Ma's fans totaled 9 million, ranking first among the e-commerce live streams in rural China.

In August 2019, Ma was among China's top ten females who contributed to poverty alleviation, and she was invited to the Alibaba Conference for Women Entrepreneurship. 

"I hope that through our efforts, more Yunnan specialties can be sold outside the mountains, and local farmers can increase some income." Ma said.

Reporting by Shen Yan; trans-editing by Wang Shixue