As the annual plenary sessions of the National People’s Congress and the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (the Two Sessions) draw near, Du Huiping, a member of the CPPCC National Committee and president of Chongqing University of Technology, gets much busier than usual. He is occupied with improving the proposals he prepared for the Two Sessions, focusing on rural e-commerce in rural revitalization.

Du Huiping, a member of the CPPCC National Committee and president of the Chongqing University of Technology.

The year 2020 marked the endgame of poverty alleviation, by which time all 832 impoverished counties across the country had all been lifted out of poverty. Du Huiping believes that rural e-commerce can help enhance poverty alleviation outcomes, prevent falling back to poverty again, and further rural revitalization.

"Rural e-commerce has boomed over the years." Du Huiping introduced that a range of policies have been rolled out to support rural e-commerce, catalyzing agricultural upgrading, rural development, and farmers' income increase, but further development is needed.

To this end, Du Huiping has visited rural areas and rural e-commerce industrial parks time after time, whereby he has spotted some problems in the development of rural e-commerce, which will be emphasized at the Two Sessions of this year.

Du Huiping has found out five issues. For example, due to a lack of unified regulatory requirements of the online information platform on which rural e-commerce relied for trading, resulting in the platform's ineffective review and supervision of merchant qualifications and required information, some merchants have joined the platform even without market access qualifications and standardized operation capabilities.

"Some sales models relying on the social network platform may permit a grey area of market regulation." WeChat business, which is based on the expansion of interpersonal relationships, is not subject to necessary approval or regulation due to the general lack of offline stores among operators.

"We should bring all the operators of the e-commerce market into the scope of regulation, eliminate all gaps in regulation, and ensure the quality of products and services." Du Huiping said.

Additionally, in the building of the e-commerce platform, we should ramp up investment in operation and maintenance to ensure transactions' safety. It is also necessary to augment the governance of the network environment of e-commerce, the crackdown on the behavior of giving malicious negative reviews, and encourage operators to establish a fine reputation, permitting a good environment for online transactions. A versatile settlement mechanism for disputes in e-commerce should be established to timely and effectively resolve disputes before resorting to the court's appellate jurisdiction.