But Chengmai's ambitions rest on more than low costs and good ports. The county also boasts Hainan's first and largest digital economy cluster — Hainan Ecological Software Park.

"More than 17,000 enterprises have registered there, with combined annual revenue exceeding 200 billion yuan ($29.3 billion). Tech giants including Baidu, Tencent and Meituan have a presence."

The park was also approved as one of China's first digital service export bases, and its game-centric global public services platform has launched 158 Chinese games overseas, with more than 12 million registered users outside China.

"That digital infrastructure provides invaluable technical and data-compliance support for cross-border e-commerce," Huang said.

Financial services are equally robust. Chengmai has built a fund matrix of "mother funds plus sub-funds plus special funds". The entire county now hosts 55 registered private fund managers, managing 1,748 funds with total assets exceeding 220 billion yuan — more than half of the entire island's total.

The story of Chengmai is not isolated. Across Hainan, a bigger picture is emerging. In Haikou's industrial parks, livestreaming rooms facing Southeast Asia are running at full capacity. More than a thousand foreign livestreamers now operate in that park alone.

In Sanya, cross-border e-commerce charter flights are also busy traveling around the world.

Zhang Chunsheng, president of the Hainan Cross-border E-commerce Association, puts the transformation into a historical context.

"For a long time, when people in Hainan said 'cross-border e-commerce', they meant imports," he recalled. "Without a strong manufacturing base like Guangzhou or Hangzhou, Hainan naturally focused on bringing goods in — that's how we got the label 'the island of imported goods'."

That began to change two years ago, when the so-called "9610" e-commerce retail export model took off. About two years ago, Hainan's cross-border e-commerce export value reached roughly 2 billion yuan, mostly via "transshipment aggregation" — mainly goods made in the Pearl River or Yangtze River deltas being shipped to Hainan for customs clearance, then sent directly to overseas consumers using Hainan's extensive Southeast Asia shipping routes.

Special customs operations have brought two major benefits, Zhang said. First, the entire island has become a comprehensive pilot zone for exports — a scale and degree of autonomy unmatched anywhere else in China.

Second, a massive tourist dividend has evolved. "Hainan receives about 90 million tourists a year. That could rise to 400 million within two to three years," Zhang predicted. Those 400 million visitors will generate new offline-online hybrid models — O2O, self-pickup and fast delivery — aimed at foreign travelers, creating a completely new growth frontier.

"Some people say Hainan has no industry cluster," Zhang said. "But neither did Hong Kong nor Singapore. Hainan's goal is to become a free trade port with its own manufacturing support. The current zero-tariff policy covering 6,600 tariff lines benefits enterprises, but the real intent is to encourage the import of production-oriented raw materials to attract substantive processing and manufacturing to the island, and to gradually cultivate a local industrial base. That road is longer, but once built, its value will be much higher."

As dusk falls over Chengmai, Imane wraps up her final broadcast of the day."I'm not just selling a lamp or a speaker," she said, unplugging her microphone. "I'm showing them that Chinese innovation is real, that it can make their life better. And I'm from Morocco — they see me, they trust me and they start to trust China."

Hainan, once a tropical vacation getaway, is now a frontier of a different kind — an island where a young woman from Casablanca and a young man from Accra are helping the world see a new China, one livestreaming session at a time.

Contact the writers at masi@chinadaily.com.cn