If “being able to get things done” and “doing things quickly” are the “basics” of government services, then Baoding City, Hebei Province is trying to leap into a new stage of value-added services of “getting things done” and “doing good things”.
At the Baoding Citizen Service Center, the approval window has quietly transformed into an industry empowerment platform – the country’s first cross-border e-commerce service center embedded in the Citizen Service Center is officially operational, turning the government affairs space into an “industrial accelerator”.
The starting point of this leap is the enterprise service center established in June 2024.
By visiting more than 1,700 companies and collecting 1,947 appeals, Baoding accurately identified two core pain points: First, the supply of talents is insufficient. There is a general lack of young talents who understand foreign languages, e-commerce, and foreign trade in counties. Second, market expansion is difficult. A large number of traditional companies have high-quality products but no cross-border channels, and they are deterred by the high e-commerce threshold.
Facing the problem head-on, Baoding came up with a solution – to build a cross-border e-commerce service center and to jointly cultivate talents among government, schools and enterprises.
Faced with the common pain points of traditional enterprises such as “products but no channels” and the high threshold for cross-border e-commerce, in the first half of 2025, the Baoding Municipal Administrative Approval Bureau made a bold decision: to open a special area in the Citizen Service Center and build a cross-border e-commerce service center.
This model is the first of its kind among citizen service centers nationwide.
The cross-border e-commerce service center area has eight major product exhibition areas – agricultural products, textiles, luggage, electrical equipment, traditional Chinese medicine, auto parts, handicrafts, daily necessities, etc., displaying more than 8,900 exhibits, and 255 local companies have settled in.
Introducing professional operating companies such as Silk Road Trading and Tangerine Technology, covering the four major platforms of Ozon (Russia), Amazon, AliExpress, and TikTok, providing companies with one-stop services in product selection, channels, and operations.
“The cross-border e-commerce service center has built a global display and trading platform for our local enterprises in Baoding, bringing real business opportunities.” said Bai Yanhui, head of Hebei Funong Food Co., Ltd.
“The government affairs hall is not only a place for business, but also a place for entrepreneurship. During the day, citizens come here to handle government affairs; throughout the day, companies are incubated here.” Pan Hong, deputy director of the Baoding Municipal Affairs Service Center (Baoding Enterprise Service Center), said.
It has achieved initial results: it has brought in 10 million yuan of orders and successfully incubated four cross-border e-commerce operating enterprises, including Baoding Silk Road Cross-border, Qianhai Tangerine, Ai Ziyi Trading, and Guofa Qianxing Wuba Science and Technology; helped Hebei Shenli Rigging Group open up sales in Russia and other countries, reaching an intended order of 2 million yuan; promoted the offline wholesale sales of selenium-rich black peanuts in Fuping County for 27,000 yuan, and online sales of more than 100,000 yuan through the JD platform.
The cross-border e-commerce service center not only provides product display and order matching, but also provides full-chain services from training, operations, logistics to foreign exchange settlement. It also regularly invites platform officials, payment institutions, and logistics companies to hold salons and trainings.
The cross-border e-commerce service center has solved the “channel” problem, but how to solve the “talent difficulty”?
The answer given by Baoding is: bring in university resources and let students grow around the company.
Baoding Municipal Administrative Approval Bureau signed contracts with four universities, Hebei Agricultural University, Hebei Finance College, Baoding Vocational and Technical College, and Hebei Software Vocational and Technical College, focusing on student training and industry-university-research cooperation.
Since March this year, more than 210 English major students have been organized to carry out on-site teaching in the product selection center, simulating export business, writing English contracts, shooting promotional videos, and conducting live delivery training; corporate business managers have been invited to the school to conduct special lectures on “Foreign Trade Transformation in the AI Era”; cross-border e-commerce micro-major students from Hebei Agricultural University have gone to the product selection center to conduct live delivery training.
“Students are directly exposed to real products and real platforms in the center, which is much better than learning theory in the classroom. Many students actively choose to stay in Baoding for employment in local companies after the practical training.” Teacher Zhang Xinxin, director of the Business English Teaching and Research Section of the School of International Business Foreign Languages of Hebei University of Finance, said that the model of “classrooms in the government affairs hall and classrooms on the front lines of industry” is cultivating cross-border e-commerce talents that can be “retained and used” for county specialty industries.
The collaboration between government, schools and enterprises is changing the brain drain pattern of “training in Baoding and employment in other places”.
“I am from Qingyuan District, Baoding. I always felt that there was insufficient development space in my hometown. After experiencing the live broadcast of the practical training center, I saw the huge potential of Baoding’s local advantageous industries such as Tangxian and Shunping specialty agricultural products, Mancheng paper products, and Baigou luggage in the e-commerce track.” said Zhao Hanxiao, a micro-majored student in cross-border e-commerce of agricultural products at Hebei Agricultural University.
Now she has made up her mind to stay in Baoding to find a job and start a business after graduation, and use her professional skills to empower the development of local characteristic industries.
A good business environment is not only “easy to get in, good-looking, and easy to get things done”, but also “thinking about what companies want, running what they need, and solving their difficulties.”
The person in charge of the Baoding Municipal Administrative Approval Bureau said that currently we must focus on solving the congestion points of cross-border e-commerce in logistics, payment, taxation, etc., and at the same time improve the internship employment conversion rate under the collaboration of government, schools and enterprises.
The future direction is to transform the government affairs hall from the “end point of service” to the “starting point of development”, guided by the value-added reform of government services, to find a path to upgrade the business environment with Baoding characteristics.
