In 2015, when Liu Rui, a doctor of computer science and technology from Sichuan province, decided to move his family to Guizhou province, many of his friends were surprised.

Liu, 41, had been working for 16 years with United States tech giant Oracle before settling in the Guanshanhu district of Guiyang, capital of Guizhou, to help promote big data at a local financial enterprise.

"Preferential policies, competitive salaries and subsidies, a sound working environment, advanced education facilities and the vision and determination of the local government to drive technological innovation－why not here?" he said.

Gone are the days when talent from China and abroad with doctorates in strategic industries chose to live in coastal cities when they relocated to the country.

"I have always dreamed about leveraging what I learned to contribute to my homeland. It is here in Guizhou that I can finally fulfill that dream," Liu said.

Liu was the first batch of talent under a project launched in Guiyang in 2015 to attract 100 innovative and pioneering entrepreneurs and experts to big data companies and research institutions.

Nestled in a mountainous region, Guizhou has been striving in recent years to become a global big data hub and to help develop the economy, boost employment and combat poverty.

It has been investing on a large scale to attract high-quality talent to improve its big data industry. Those hired receive funding and rent subsidies based on their potential for prospects of innovation and development.

Another program aims to select more than 10 big data industry leaders with a mastery of cutting-edge technologies. They are expected to receive up to 1 million yuan ($153,000) in subsidies.

"Having worked on big data here for several years, I began to think about how to leverage it to build the city into an area that is high-quality, highly efficient and ecological and a beautiful pastoral dream for many more urban citizens," Liu said.

In 2019, he resigned from the financial company and founded three agricultural big data companies. Through lengthy research and development, he and his team finally developed an order-based agriculture platform enabled by big data.

Different from other e-commerce platforms, a big data platform enables customers to participate in the process of planting or breeding through the use of cameras, meaning that customers can supervise the whole process.

At the same time, the platform has introduced agricultural insurance to provide guarantees so that farmers and producers feel more assured about the new business models.

"Through agricultural big data traceability technology and agricultural insurance, a new consumption experience of efficient, ecological and delicate agriculture has been created," Liu said.

He says the platform has over 10 types of order-based agricultural products and more than 300 e-commerce products. Since the platform was launched, it has achieved a total sales income of more than 3 million yuan.

In order to encourage more producers to join the platform, the company set up Guizhou Wanqian Ecological Agriculture Development Co, and it also built a planting demonstration base on 200 hectares of land in Guizhou's Qianxinan Bouyei and Miao autonomous prefecture.

It also collaborated with a company in Zhuchang village to explore multi-model big data projects, examples of which include a big data agricultural science base, a seedling base and a processing plant for tourism use.

The Zhuchang base has organized a series of activities, such as parent-child farming research experiences and elderly ecological agriculture healthcare tourism, that have attracted more than 13,000 visitors.

"We plan to expand the base into 50 hectares after completion, and the annual output value is expected to hit over 15 million yuan," Liu added.

Guizhou aims to build itself into one of the largest big data clusters globally over the next few years and spur a new wave of growth in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last year, over 100 big data projects worth some 21.6 billion yuan were introduced to Guiyang. The city's software and information technology revenues exceeded 16 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 14.3 percent.

Zhao Yandi contributed to this story.