导读（咖啡网 coffeeyo.com）：Riding the Shanghai–Yunnan collaboration, Zhenkang County lifted its coffee industry from cheap raw beans to local brands, with output value leaping from RMB 17.25 million to RMB …
Editor’s Note (Coffeeyo.com): Riding the tailwind of the Shanghai–Yunnan collaboration, Zhenkang County has pushed its coffee industry from selling cheap raw beans toward local brands that reach markets at home and abroad; its annual output value has leapt from RMB 17.25 million to RMB 150 million, and an “enterprise + village collective + farmer” interest-linkage model has driven stable income growth for border-area residents — a vivid microcosm of east–west collaborative industrial support.
Zhenkang once enjoyed uniquely favorable coffee-growing conditions, yet was hampered by weak processing, an absent brand and narrow sales channels, so its fine beans could only be sold cheaply as primary raw material.
Riding the east–west collaboration between Shanghai and Yunnan, Shanghai’s special funding for Yunnan assistance acted like “yeast,” activating capital, shoring up the value chain and linking farmers to prosperity, letting the “golden beans” of the border mountains step out of the hills and into the market, writing a new chapter of rural revitalization marked by a thriving industry, prosperous people and stable borders.
Zhenkang has a long coffee-growing history and superior natural endowments, yet for a long time its value chain was “broken at processing, weak at branding, short at sales.” The fresh cherries farmers worked hard to grow were mostly sold after simple primary processing, and the rich value-added stayed local no more. To unblock the industry’s bottlenecks, the answer was not simply “giving money like a blood transfusion” but “building the nest to attract the phoenix” by pinpointing the weak links.
The Shanghai–Yunnan collaboration precisely targeted the industry’s pain points, directing support funds to the weakest hardware links in the chain. In 2023, RMB 7 million in Yunnan-assistance funds built the Hali Coffee modern processing plant, establishing a complete production system integrating clean manufacturing, roasting and grinding, packaging and warehousing, product R&D, and live-streaming experience. In 2024, another RMB 10.25 million landed the Hali Village specialty coffee estate project, pushing the industry from pure production and processing toward the high-value-added track of culture-tourism integration.
The RMB 17.25 million in Yunnan-assistance funds not only built plants and estates but became a weighty credit endorsement, effectively lowering the risk threshold for market entities to start businesses and invest, exerting a leverage effect far beyond the sum.
Relying on the industrial platform built with collaborative funds, two coffee enterprises under Shanghai Zhangshang Shehui Group settled in Zhenkang, completing a cumulative RMB 150 million in social-capital investment. Fiscal support funds leveraged nearly nine times that in social capital, achieving “small funds moving a large industry,” continuously channeling eastern capital concepts and market resources into the southwestern border town and injecting strong market vitality into the coffee industry’s leapfrog development.
With plants built and capital brought in, the priority is to deepen and refine the whole value chain. Breaking from the traditional path of “only selling coffee beans,” and continuously empowered by the Shanghai–Yunnan collaboration, Zhenkang has built an integrated “industry + processing + sales + culture-tourism” development pattern. Enterprises have laid out 11,000 mu of premium coffee bases, planting quality varieties such as Geisha, Sarchimor and Catimor to control quality at the source. In the modern factory, fully automated sorting, roasting and packaging lines run at full speed, processing fresh cherries into diversified products — freeze-dried powder, drip bags, specialty roasted beans — greatly raising the value-added of the agricultural goods.
While deepening processing, it is also expanding the market. Breaking from the traditional offline distribution model, Zhenkang is vigorously developing new formats of “coffee + e-commerce” and “coffee + culture-tourism.”
The immersive specialty coffee estate is open to the public, blending the local “Ashuse” ethnic folk culture and hosting coffee-picking festivals that let visitors enter hillside tea gardens to experience the fun of picking and processing; meanwhile it has built an online sales matrix spanning domestic and overseas channels — Douyin, JD.com, Amazon — operating eight official accounts for live-stream commerce, sending border coffee across the country and abroad through the screen, with enterprise annual output value reaching RMB 15 million. The agricultural product once hidden deep in the mountains has transformed into a best-selling specialty consumer good, completing a brilliant turn from primary raw material to branded product.
The ultimate footing of industrial development is to let all border-area communities share the dividends of growth. Zhenkang innovatively built an “enterprise + village collective + farmer” community of shared interests, opening a channel for industrial returns to flow back to the villages. The Hali Coffee project signed interest-linkage agreements with multiple villages including Hali Village and Banlong Village in Nansan Town.
Through standardized technical training and a contracted base-management model, it has cultivated 60 professional coffee-farming households, radiating to stable income growth for over a hundred farming households.
A tiny coffee bean has become a real boost to villagers’ pockets, enabling “farming the fields in busy seasons and working nearby in slack seasons” — earning money without leaving family care behind. A thriving industry helps people live and work in contentment, further consolidating the foundations of border ethnic unity and frontier prosperity and stability.
From planting across the hills yet constrained by the value chain, to clustered capital, rows of factories and picturesque estates; from selling cheap raw material, to building local brands whose products reach home and abroad; from farmers going it alone, to villages, enterprises and people forming a community of shared interests — Zhenkang coffee’s transformation is a vivid microcosm of the Shanghai–Yunnan east–west collaborative industrial support.
A handshake across a thousand miles of mountains and seas is more than the landing of funds and projects; it is a two-way convergence of development philosophy and market thinking. The Yunnan-assistance funds act as a “lever,” prying open social capital, shoring up value-chain shortfalls and activating endogenous local development momentum. Today, the rich aroma of coffee drifts through Zhenkang’s border mountains. Going forward, Zhenkang County will keep seizing the Shanghai–Yunnan collaboration opportunity, continuously strengthen its full-chain coffee industry, let more border-area residents grow together with the industry, and solidify the foundations of border rural revitalization through specialty-industry revitalization.
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- Original: Lijiang Net, “From RMB 17.25 Million to RMB 150 Million! How Shanghai’s ‘Yeast’ Transformed Zhenkang Coffee”
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