For thousands of years, the journey of agricultural products from Chinese fields to dining tables has never been as seamless as it is today. In the past, farmers who grew quality produce had limited options: wait for itinerant traders to come by or haul their goods to a local market, often forced to accept rock-bottom prices from layers of middlemen. A bountiful harvest did not guarantee a bountiful income—a dilemma that has persisted for centuries. Now, PDD Holdings Inc (PDD.US) is testing a "free village delivery" service that is fundamentally changing this dynamic. As delivery trucks roll into villages daily with parcels, picking up agricultural goods on their return trip, rural areas have become an indispensable link in the commercial supply chain.
In Qi County, Henan—renowned nationwide as the "Hometown of Chinese Garlic"—70-year-old garlic farmer Zhang Zhenfeng has completely changed how he sells his crop this year. He no longer has to haul his garlic to the county market where prices are dictated by buyers, nor does he passively wait for local peddlers to show up. Instead, Zhang Jinjian, a 20-something e-commerce seller from the same village, now comes directly to his door to purchase the harvest, paying 500 to 600 yuan more per mu than the market rate. Behind this transaction lies a systematic overhaul of rural logistics efficiency. At the end of 2025, PDD Holdings Inc launched its "free village delivery" pilot in Qi County: trucks bring in parcels and take garlic back out. This breaks the long-standing industry headache of "empty return trips for village deliveries," dramatically cutting the logistics costs for shipping agricultural products out of the countryside. When the delivery truck's route and the farm's output converge into one path, the fundamental logic of rural commerce is being rewritten.
So how does PDD Holdings Inc make this "two-way street" between village inbound and outbound logistics possible? Zhang Jinjian's e-commerce journey began in 2017 when he opened his first store on the platform. Initially, orders trickled in at just a few or a dozen per day, gradually climbing to 100-200. The turning point came during a platform promotion: thanks to the superior quality of his garlic, the store was flooded with 20,000 orders overnight. "I had absolutely no experience with that scale," Zhang recalls. His pre-stocked packing boxes were nowhere near sufficient. He scrambled to contact manufacturers for emergency shipments, enlisted dozens of villagers to help, and it took three grueling days to ship all 20,000 orders. That experience taught him a critical lesson: as order volumes surge, shipping efficiency and delivery timelines must keep pace. His solution was to purchase his own truck, organize workers to load packed garlic daily, and hire a driver to haul it to the county's express delivery depot. The 10-kilometer short-haul trip cost over 3,000 yuan per month in labor and fuel—nearly 40,000 yuan annually. He had attempted to negotiate with several courier companies to pick up parcels directly from the village, but all refused: a trip to the village meant an empty outbound leg, making the cost unsustainable. At that time, shipping a 5-jin bag of garlic from the county depot nationwide cost about 7 yuan per parcel. Factoring in the extra cost of village pickup, it was still cheaper to do the transport himself.
The breakthrough arrived in late 2025. PDD Holdings Inc piloted its "free village delivery" service in Qi County, where delivery trucks bring inbound parcels to villages each day and, on the return trip, conveniently collect packages villagers need to send out. Zhang Jinjian hit it off with the service's field operators: during the day, he collects, sorts, packs, and labels the garlic; in the afternoon, the delivery truck unloads villagers' online shopping orders and then swings by his warehouse to load up the day's outgoing parcels. The empty-return problem was solved, garlic no longer required repeated loading and unloading, and the anxiety over tight timelines vanished. Duan Yuanhang, the manager of the "free village delivery" transfer station in Qi County, has seen the shift firsthand: "In the past, village orders were scattered, road conditions were complex, and per-parcel delivery costs were high, so courier companies had little incentive to go rural. Now that PDD Holdings Inc covers the secondary transfer fees, everyone's enthusiasm has changed dramatically." Zhang Jinjian crunched the numbers: previously, getting garlic out of the village meant spending over 3,000 yuan monthly to transport it to the county depot, then paying 7 yuan per 5-jin parcel for nationwide shipping. Now, the same weight ships directly from the village at around 3 yuan per parcel. "With logistics costs down, our profit margins have thickened considerably." For him, this is an efficiency leap from "delivering it myself" to "boarding at the village gate"; for the broader Qi County garlic industry, it's a supply chain transformation from "agricultural products struggle to reach the city" to "goods board the truck right at the farm gate."
Logistics opens up, and economic vitality flows in. Zhang Jinjian's business transformation quickly rippled through the entire village. Previously, garlic farmers fretted most about finding buyers. This year, Zhang has purchased large volumes of garlic from local farmers at prices slightly above market rates, allowing growers like Zhang Zhenfeng to earn an extra 500-600 yuan per mu. At Zhang's warehouse, many villagers who supply him also pitch in with packing, paid by the piece, earning 120-130 yuan per day—roughly 4,000 yuan a month. His online store also employs five or six livestream hosts, each broadcasting for two to three hours, with fixed salaries ranging from 3,600 to 4,000 yuan. As delivery trucks roll down country lanes daily, garlic fields and farmers appear on livestreams, and the entire chain—from planting and harvesting to packing and shipping—is completed within the village, which means the profits stay local. Duan Yuanhang offers another set of figures: the Qi County transfer station currently processes 10,000 to 12,000 inbound parcels daily, with about 2,000 outbound parcels, of which roughly 1,800 are agricultural products—mostly local garlic. The gap between inbound and outbound volumes underscores the vast untapped potential for "upward circulation" from rural areas—and the process of closing that gap is itself creating new value. In Caotun, also in Qi County, residents previously had to travel five kilometers to the nearest town to collect parcels, a round trip of ten kilometers taking nearly an hour. Now that village-level pickup points have been established, villagers can collect their packages right at the village entrance. Xu Lingling, who has run a grocery store for 16 years, became a "free village delivery" pickup point at the end of last year. "We now receive 100-200 parcels in daily. People picking up packages often grab a bottle of water or a pack of cigarettes, and foot traffic at the store has clearly increased."
But this logistics overhaul didn't get off to a smooth start. Duan Yuanhang recalls that during the first forays into villages, residents were highly wary—many even filmed the staff with their phones. "We then standardized our work uniforms, promotional posters, and vehicle signage, ramped up outreach, and let villagers see the convenience for themselves. Only then did their concerns gradually fade." Today, more and more young people are opening stores on the platform, selling their hometown's quality garlic across the country. "Before, it was impossible—just the shipping hurdle alone was a dealbreaker," says Zhang Jinjian. "Without stable logistics channels and reasonable courier pricing, small sellers simply can't get off the ground." When delivery trucks no longer return empty, the village ceases to be just a consumer endpoint and becomes a starting point in the supply chain. When micro-entrepreneurs like Zhang Jinjian stop worrying about logistics costs, when garlic farmers like Zhang Zhenfeng stop fretting over sales channels, and when village-level pickup points like Xu Lingling's use parcel collection to invigorate their shop—a self-sustaining capillary network of rural commerce is taking shape. It proves a simple truth: where logistics reaches, economic vitality naturally finds a way to grow. What PDD Holdings Inc has achieved through infrastructure investment is rural China's leap from "passive waiting" to "active connection"—an unprecedented repositioning of the Chinese village in the commercial landscape.
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