Ma Lingmin, better known by her screen name “Yunnan Xiaohua” is a post-95s girl from Yunnan. She is riding the wave of the live streaming to sell local specialties from Yunnan province. 

Ma Lingmin chose to be a preschool teacher in Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan after graduating from university in 2017. Earlier last year, her cousin Jia Ruixun invited her to start a business together and to sell Yunnan agricultural products with live streaming. The two hit it off.

The business didn't start off well. In the first three months, they released over 40 videos but only got a few hundred hits.

Ma realized that live streaming is not as simple as they thought. She began to change the presentation style and choose more featured products. Once she and Jia Ruixun shot a video of a special Yunnan dish—fried roses, and the video became a big hit, boosting her follower count to more than 50 thousand.

Since then, they have insisted in shooting videos about featured products and helping poor families to use live broadcasts to sell produce. Over the past year, Ma Lingmin has spent 350 days traveling 4,000 kilometers and shooting videos in 36 villages. Now, she has accumulated more than 5 million followers on short video platforms.

In Yunnan, due to the efforts made by video blogger like Ma Linmin, more and more specialties have been promoted and sold nationwide. According to the statistics, on September 23 last year when China’s first Farmers’ Harvest Festival was celebrated, 6,000 sets of pomegranates from northwest Yunnan’s Yongsheng County were sold in 10 minutes through Taobao live streaming. And the online sales of 109 Yunnan agricultural products, including Yuanyang red rice, Wenshan notoginseng and Pu’ er tea, exceeded 4.4 billion yuan.