After he was released on medical parole in 2002, Chu, at the age of 74, built an orange orchard with his wife, Ma Jingfen, and started growing oranges on 160 hectares of land in the mountains of Yunnan.

Released on medical parole in 2002 at the age of 74, Chu started his second startup, building an orange orchard with his wife, Ma Jinfen.

Having worked on the orange orchard for a number of years, Chu set up an orange company, taking the post of chairman on his 90-year-old birthday.

Late last year HeyTea opened its first tea bar in Singapore in Ion Orchard shopping mall.

The whole street had been transformed into a vibrant neighborhood, to be distinct from the modern glass-and-steel commercial architecture of the world famous Orchard Road area, which was only five minutes away.

The young successor has given a new life to the orchard business.

Pornlert Chanto, the owner of a durian orchard in Thailand, hailed the launch of the corridor.

Thanks to the increasing Chinese orders, the revenue of Chanto's orchard has increased from about 3 million yuan in 2018 to 3.5 million yuan in 2022.

He added that it was difficult for local people to maintain even an orchard because of the inclement weather and harsh environmental conditions, with constant winds and blowing sand severely affecting fruit growth.

"When we arrived here, we were so poor that we did not have enough money to get married," said Li, adding that now they run an orchard and a dairy farm on what was once a desert.

Nisachol Thaithong, a Thai national in Nanning, Guangxi's capital city, runs a business importing durians from her family's orchard in Thailand to China and has accumulated a stable customer source over the past years.

For 10 busy days in August, fruit farmer Zhang Yuqing could be seen fussing over the apples in her orchard.

Zhang, who has three decades of experience growing apples, has also been replacing the old trees in her orchard with newer varieties.

He contacted the customer and the orchard, arranged the logistics and packed 100 parcels all by himself, Zhang said.

Miao Ning, 38, who runs a blueberry orchard in Chentuan town in Donggang district of Rizhao, Shandong province, is familiar with every stage of the fruit's growth.

Looking at the orchard he is in charge of, Li Yan is elated with the scene — bright red, round apples hang on the branches while workers carefully pick the apples and put them into fruit baskets.

"At present, our company has a cold storage area of some 5,000 square meters, storing 9,000 metric tons of apples for nearly half a year, which can be sold during Spring Festival," said Chen Fu, who is in charge of the orchard warehousing, adding that through staggered sales, they can earn an additional profit of 20 million yuan.

Recently, Li Kaichuang and Zhu Jintao from the Suqian unit walked into the orchard for electrical checks, helping to avoid any worries about electricity usage for the apples' sorting, processing and warehouse refrigeration.

In a lychee orchard in Maoming, Guangdong province, on Monday afternoon, He Jinbao climbed a tree and, dripping with sweat, picked the fruit, which is ready for harvest.

"The lychee orchard in Boqiao — known as a living lychee museum, with a planting area of more than 200 hectares — has 39 ancient lychee trees, each more than 500 years old.

The first of such an appliance was launched in early June and put into use at an orchard in Maoming, Guangdong, a traditional production and trade base of lychee.

Each orchard has a special page recording its basic information such as planting area, the number of trees, the average age of trees, annual harvest, and use of fertilizers and pesticides, according to Jin Yi, who is in charge of the e-commerce department of Xiuwen Guotou Group.

In addition, each kiwi is given an "identification card", so that customers can scan the QR code to learn about the orchard, use of fertilizers, picking time and sales regions, to realize traceable information to secure food quality.

In November 2018, a long line formed as Heytea launched sales of its product at the ION Orchard shopping complex in Singapore.

Nation, economic bloc cooperate on innovation to ease farmers' burdensRAUB, Malaysia－Standing in his 10-acre durian orchard in Malaysia's central Pahang state, Leong Pui Sam, who calls himself Sam, said the collaboration with Regaltech and Alibaba Cloud in smart farming is life-changing.

Alex Ch'ng, general manager of Regaltech, said that sensor nodes were provided to farmers, assisting them in monitoring the plants' condition without the need to be physically present at the orchard.

By collecting data through sensor nodes at the orchard and analyzing data like electric conductivity, PH, soil moisture, weather, irrigation schedule on their cloud, the smart platform helps to provide professional guidance for durian farming.

"The little guys eclipse their hulking counterparts in terms of orchard maintenance, ditch digging and house renovation.

You Hao, who runs an orchard of about three hectares in the city of Ganzhou, East China's Jiangxi province, now uses the mini machinery to dig ditches and furrows of manure.

Navel oranges grow in abundance in the city, and the reddish-brown soil with chunks of rocks makes for heavy work, previously forcing him to hire four or five workers in his orchard.

"Last year, my apricot orchard generated nearly 20,000 yuan ($2,860) of income for me after the sales channel became unimpeded," a local farmer shared.

A variety of smart agricultural technologies from Pinduoduo precisely controlled temperature, time, and humidity for orange planting in an orchard in Yunnan province.

Yu was a television antenna saleswoman before she returned home in 1984 to plant peaches in her family's orchard.

Luo's cooperative, Youyou Orchard Cooperative, has a peach farm that occupies about 6.7 hectares, with a revenue of nearly 5 million yuan last year.

NANNING－Gan Youqin, an orchard owner, wears a T-shirt with oversleeves covering her tanned arms, her hair tied into a ponytail with faded highlights at the tips.

She runs a family orchard in Lingshan county, the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, the home of the Chinese lychee.

Gan has a team in her orchard producing short videos about her country life, documenting her daily activities such as picking fruit, catching fish, pickling cucumbers and cooking for gatherings.

Timothy Orchard, head of equities for Asia Pacific at Fidelity International, shared the concern that an escalating trade tension between the US and China could be damaging for the markets.

"Whilst there might be a temptation to use trade barriers to redress the costs that trade imposes on certain industries in any one country, in aggregate the costs of protection typically exceed any benefit received for an individual economy," Orchard said in a note.