NANNING, July 1 (Xinhua) -- This summer, Lu Peng'an arrived at an e-commerce packing warehouse in Tiandong County, located in south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, determined to earn his first-year university tuition on his own.
A recent high school graduate who was raised in a mango-farming family, Lu initially thought the job would be mostly about livestreaming.
"I thought e-commerce was just about selling on camera," he said. "But the real work is offline, in the form of receiving, sorting, packing and shipping the fruit." Now, he plans to soak up as much know-how as he can and take it back to his village. "I don't just want to grow mangoes," he said. "I want to know how to sell them too."
Lu's ambition reflects a broader shift underway in the city of Baise in Guangxi, a mountainous former revolutionary base that has emerged as one of China's leading mango-producing regions.
Thanks to a favorable microclimate and selenium-rich red soils along the Youjiang River, the industry has expanded from just about 10,000 mu (about 667 hectares) in 1985, when policymakers first promoted mangoes as a pillar agricultural industry for large-scale development, to 1.22 million mu by the end of 2025, with an annual output of 1.26 million tonnes in 2025, benefiting over 200,000 rural households.
But local agricultural officials said output alone no longer ensures steady growth. The more pressing challenge is what happens to the harvest after it leaves the tree. Fresh mangoes spoil quickly, which can turn a bumper crop into a price war, resulting in a squeeze on growers' profit margins.
The first major upgrade came not through processing but via the Internet. Meng Tiangeng, president of the Tiandong E-commerce Association, dated the shift back to 2012, when local traders became pioneers in selling perishable goods online in rural China. The move was especially significant for Guiqi, Baise's signature green-skinned mango variety. Prized for its flavor but notoriously short-lived, it had long made long-distance transport a high-risk bet.
"Before e-commerce, mangoes could only go through traditional wholesale markets with very limited reach," Meng said. "Once online platforms took root, consumers ordered, and we picked, sorted and shipped directly."
By 2014, Guiqi was selling for 16 to 20 yuan (about 2.94 U.S. dollars) per kilo online, a premium that made the variety profitable and helped turn it into a nationally recognized brand.
Early sales to Beijing, some 3,000 kilometers away, required careful consumer education. "The fruit tends to wrinkle as it ripens," Meng said. "That led some buyers to think it had gone bad." Today, many of these customers message him every July to ask if the season has started.
To ensure the fruit reaches customers nationwide in good condition, local growers follow a dedicated e-commerce sales standard for mangoes developed jointly with market regulators, and crucially, the ripeness at which mangoes should leave the warehouse, which depends on the destination.
"Mangoes must be 85-percent ripe for distant cities like Beijing, where transit time finishes the ripening process, and 90-percent ripe for neighboring Guangdong Province," Meng explained.
During the mango harvest season, the city employs around 6,000 workers, with more than 3,000 on packing lines alone at the peak, according to a local agricultural official.
In the orchards, mechanization is also increasing. Yang Jiang, who runs a growing operation in Tiandong, has replaced approximately half of his manual labor with drones capable of carrying up to 50 kilograms of fruit per flight from tree to assembly area, sparing workers steep uphill climbs. "Labor costs have dropped from over 0.4 yuan per kilo to under 0.2 yuan," Yang said. "For an orchard producing 1 million kilos a year, that saves 200,000 yuan annually on harvesting alone, before counting government subsidies for the equipment."
Liu Dehuan, chief agronomist at Tiandong's county agricultural authorities, estimates drone operations are at least 30 times more efficient than manual harvesting on comparable terrain.
One notable innovation, however, began as a workaround for an export hurdle. Lin De'en, who runs an export processing business in the county, had long tried to ship ripe Tainong mangoes, which is a high-sugar, aromatic variety well suited to processing, to Russia.
The fruit survived the journey but turned black on supermarket shelves due to oxidation. Lin's solution is to process and freeze the pulp into ice pops before export. A trial shipment of 10 cartons was quickly followed by rising demand, spurring other popular formats such as purée and snacks. This model has since expanded to the Republic of Korea, Vietnam, and China's Hong Kong.
Domestically, China's booming beverage sector, especially tea-based drinks, has become a major growth driver. Mixue, one of the country's fastest-growing consumer brands, uses Baise mangoes as a core ingredient in several signature drinks and has operated a local processing base since 2023.
Supported by RCEP tariff incentives and the China-Europe Railway Express logistics route, Baise's processed mango exports reached 70 million yuan last year, with local officials projecting sustained annual growth of 30 percent over the next five years.
"China's total mango cultivation has leveled off at about 6 million mu, meaning supply and demand have reached a rough equilibrium," said Liu. "That's driving a transition from sheer expansion to high-quality development in processing, mechanization and standardization, which is exactly what we've been pursuing at the local level."
"This summer job has really helped open my eyes," said Lu. "It has changed my perspective and showed me how much more I have to learn both in the fields and in the classroom. Next time I come back to this valley, I'll be a lot more professional about it." ■
