Xu Guiqing, mayor of Yingkou city in Liaoning province, helped promote local specialties on line recently via livestreaming, showing it is one of the most effective measures to help local poverty-stricken people find more ways to make money.

As the spokeswoman of the city, Xu, who appeared with a livestreaming host, set a record, with 5 million yuan in sales in six hours.

Popular goods sold via livestreaming include rice, jellyfish and paper-cuttings.

"The epidemic has brought consumption into the era of live broadcasting. We will make good use of this new platform for exhibition and marketing, explore the new commercial mode and make positive contributions to the high-quality development of the city," Xu said, adding it's a good way to lift poverty in local areas.

Public statistics show the market scale of China's "online celebrity economy" was close to 500 billion yuan last year.

Experts said by making good use of e-commerce technology and livestreaming platforms an individual, if he or she is a popular online host, has high possibility of setting a higher daily sales record than a major retailer, such as a department store or multinational supermarket chain outlet.

The city government said Yingkou has more than 130,000 internet celebrities, with a total of more than 16 million online fans in peak hours.

Zhang Xianbin, deputy mayor of Yingkou, said it will speed up construction of the "internet celebrities economy" and build the city as a regional hub in Northeast China.

The city government has attached great importance to this new economy, and has issued a package of policies including tax cut, office rent and human resources.

At present, Yingkou has built an e-commerce incubation platform, including the Internet Celebrities Building and the 1861 Internet Celebrities Industrial Park.

The industrial park has also signed agreements with a number of companies, institutions and schools to prompt business cooperation, Zhang said.