New retail has proven strategically important to China, and is expected to boost the rural economy and thus narrow the urban-rural divide, according to Zhang Ying, deputy director of Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, cited by
Sike.com, an opinion site run by Xinhua News Agency.
New retail effectively reduces the reliance of economic growth on physical spaces. An essential problem surrounding Chinese agriculture is that farmers don’t know what to plant and how to sell it. New retail platforms, on the other hand, allow consumer needs to reach farmers and meanwhile reduce their costs by minimizing logistics, Zhang said.
New retail is also expected to create more jobs, Zhang said. Many worry that new retail will allow more services to be automated and thus kill many jobs. But Zhang believes significantly more types of jobs will be created, and under official guidance these jobs will answer more precisely to the laws of value creation for the current situation. It’s an integral part of industrial upgrading, the scholar said.
New retail will also allow human resources to be allocated across a wider geographical range, Zhang noted. For example, a data analyst can be based outside of central cities like Beijing and Shanghai, and yet still be able to do the same work and so receive the same income. This process will lead to a more balanced economic growth among different regions and help solve the urban malaise in super cities, the scholar said.
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