His income depends in part on the number of orders that come from his region. ![]() But, in line with JD’s growth strategy, an equally important aspect of Xia’s job is to be a promoter for the company, getting the word out about its services. Today, Xia oversees deliveries to more than two hundred villages around the Wuling Mountains, including his birthplace. At a time when the Chinese government has instituted monumental infrastructure programs to develop these regions, companies like JD are providing a market-driven counterpart, which is likely to do for China what the Sears, Roebuck catalogue did for America in the early twentieth century. Analysts predict that China’s online retail market will double in size in the next two years, and that the growth will come disproportionately from third- and fourth-tier cities and from the country’s vast rural hinterland. Although China has the most Internet users of any country and the largest e-commerce market in the world-more than twice the size of America’s-there are still hundreds of millions of Chinese whose lives have yet to migrate online. In the Western press, JD is often referred to as the Chinese Amazon, but unlike Amazon, which has all but saturated the American e-commerce market and therefore has to expand by moving into new sectors, such as entertainment, JD still has ample room to extend its customer base-thanks to places like Cenmang and Xinhuang. JD.com, or Jingdong, as the company is known in Chinese, is the third-largest tech company in the world in terms of revenue, behind only Amazon and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, Inc. A regional station manager would be needed in Xinhuang. Xia had been making deliveries for JD.com, the second-biggest e-commerce company in China, and he heard that the business was expanding into rural Hunan. Whereas Xia had some connection to nearly everyone in Xinhuang and its surrounding villages, Shenzhen was an anonymous jumble, in which he felt like “a tiny, undifferentiated dot.” Then, eighteen months in, an unexpected opportunity arose. Work consumed most of his days, and people were aloof, with none of the warmth he’d known back home. Life in the big city was at once overwhelming and colorless. He moved to Shenzhen, a sprawling coastal city, and found a job as a courier, becoming one of China’s quarter of a billion migrant workers. Not many of his friends knew much about the Internet in those days, but Xia’s eyes were opened: “Everything that was going on in China could be squeezed onto that screen.” When the powdered-milk company downsized, he decided that it was time to look farther afield. He married a girl from a nearby village and had a son. Still, rather than becoming a manual laborer, like his parents and siblings, Xia was able to go to technical college, and afterward he got a job at a local company that produced powdered milk. It was several years before another appliance, a washing machine, entered the household. Market reforms were transforming China, but in Cenmang changes arrived slowly. The same year, the Xias bought their first TV, a black-and-white set so small that it could have fit inside the family wok. “The world was this great beyond, and we were this dot that I couldn’t even find on a map,” he told me. Neither was Xinhuang, the city that loomed so large in his imagination. In 1990, in sixth grade, Xia saw a map of the world for the first time. As a child, Xia said, he was “a happy frog,” content to play in the dirt roads between the mud houses of the village. ![]() “When you are a frog at the bottom of the well, the world is both big and small,” he likes to say, referring to a famous fable by Zhuangzi, the Aesop of ancient China, in which a frog, certain that nowhere can be as good as the environment he knows, is astonished when a turtle tells him about the sea. ![]() Trips to the county seat, Xinhuang, ten miles away, were made twice a year, on a rickety three-wheeled cart, and until the age of ten Xia didn’t leave the village at all. The region was poor, irrigation was inadequate-the family often went hungry-and there were few roads. The family made a living as corn farmers, and had been in Cenmang for more generations than anyone could remember. Xia’s mother was illiterate, and his father barely finished first grade. Xia Canjun was born in 1979, the youngest of seven siblings, in Cenmang, a village of a hundred or so households nestled at the foot of the Wuling Mountains, in the far west of Hunan Province.
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