Xia Canjun was born in 1979, the youngest of seven siblings, in Cenmang, a village of a hundred or so households nestled at the foot of the Wuling Mountains, in the far west of Hunan Province. Xia’s mother was illiterate, and his father barely finished first grade. The family made a living as corn farmers, and had been in Cenmang for more generations than anyone could remember. The region was poor, irrigation was inadequate—the family often went hungry—and there were few roads. Trips to the county seat, Xinhuang, ten miles away, were made twice a year, on a rickety three-wheeled cart, and until the age of ten Xia didn’t leave the village at all. But he was never particularly unhappy. “When you are a frog at the bottom of the well, the world is both big and small,” he likes to say, referring to a famous fable by Zhuangzi, the Aesop of ancient China, in which a frog, certain that nowhere can be as good as the environment he knows, is astonished when a turtle tells him about the sea. As a child, Xia said, he was “a happy frog,” content to play in the dirt roads between the mud houses of the village.

In 1990, in sixth grade, Xia saw a map of the world for the first time. Of course, Cenmang wasn’t on it. Neither was Xinhuang, the city that loomed so large in his imagination. “The world was this great beyond, and we were this dot that I couldn’t even find on a map,” he told me. The same year, the Xias bought their first TV, a black-and-white set so small that it could have fit inside the family wok. Market reforms were transforming China, but in Cenmang changes arrived slowly. It was several years before another appliance, a washing machine, entered the household.

Still, rather than becoming a manual laborer, like his parents and siblings, Xia was able to go to technical college, and afterward he got a job at a local company that produced powdered milk. He married a girl from a nearby village and had a son. In 2009, he bought his first smartphone. Not many of his friends knew much about the Internet in those days, but Xia’s eyes were opened: “Everything that was going on in China could be squeezed onto that screen.” When the powdered-milk company downsized, he decided that it was time to look farther afield. He moved to Shenzhen, a sprawling coastal city, and found a job as a courier, becoming one of China’s quarter of a billion migrant workers.

Life in the big city was at once overwhelming and colorless. Work consumed most of his days, and people were aloof, with none of the warmth he’d known back home. Whereas Xia had some connection to nearly everyone in Xinhuang and its surrounding villages, Shenzhen was an anonymous jumble, in which he felt like “a tiny, undifferentiated dot.” Then, eighteen months in, an unexpected opportunity arose. Xia had been making deliveries for JD.com, the second-biggest e-commerce company in China, and he heard that the business was expanding into rural Hunan. A regional station manager would be needed in Xinhuang.

JD.com, or Jingdong, as the company is known in Chinese, is the third-largest tech company in the world in terms of revenue, behind only Amazon and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, Inc. In the Western press, JD is often referred to as the Chinese Amazon, but unlike Amazon, which has all but saturated the American e-commerce market and therefore has to expand by moving into new sectors, such as entertainment, JD still has ample room to extend its customer base—thanks to places like Cenmang and Xinhuang. Although China has the most Internet users of any country and the largest e-commerce market in the world—more than twice the size of America’s—there are still hundreds of millions of Chinese whose lives have yet to migrate online. Analysts predict that China’s online retail market will double in size in the next two years, and that the growth will come disproportionately from third- and fourth-tier cities and from the country’s vast rural hinterland. At a time when the Chinese government has instituted monumental infrastructure programs to develop these regions, companies like JD are providing a market-driven counterpart, which is likely to do for China what the Sears, Roebuck catalogue did for America in the early twentieth century.

Today, Xia oversees deliveries to more than two hundred villages around the Wuling Mountains, including his birthplace. But, in line with JD’s growth strategy, an equally important aspect of Xia’s job is to be a promoter for the company, getting the word out about its services. His income depends in part on the number of orders that come from his region. Across China, JD has made a policy of recruiting local representatives who can exploit the thick social ties of traditional communities to drum up business. Xia himself is not unaware of the irony: after venturing out to the great beyond, he discovered that the world was coming to Cenmang.

The JD depot in downtown Xinhuang is on a side street, wedged between a curtain shop and a small convenience store. When I arrived, early one Sunday morning in November, Xia was rolling up the building’s metal grille with one hand and holding a steamed pork bun in the other. Xia is solidly built, with a heavy, square face made ruddy by years of outdoor work. He wore the standard uniform of a JD deliveryman: a red-and-gray windbreaker with a matching red polo shirt underneath. He liked the uniform, he told me, because customers immediately knew why he was on their doorstep. In much of China, the livery has become as recognizable as that of U.P.S. workers in the U.S.

Three younger men soon arrived, also in uniform, and Xia called a meeting to run through arrangements for what was sure to be their busiest twenty-four hours of the year: November 11th, when people all over China celebrate Singles’ Day, taking advantage of deep discounts to lavish gifts on themselves. Since 2009, the e-commerce behemoth Alibaba, drawing inspiration from Black Friday and Valentine’s Day, has made the holiday an annual nationwide shopping spree.

“Brothers!” Xia bellowed, looking down at a crumpled sheet of notes. The men stood up straight, with their hands behind their backs. “If June 18th”—the anniversary of JD’s founding, now promoted as a shopping binge to rival Singles’ Day—“was our midterms, then November 11th is the final exam! We must not lose face for JD!”

The men listened expressionlessly while Xia spoke, and, when he had finished, gave soldierly assent. All three were born and bred in the villages surrounding Xinhuang. When I asked why they had decided to work for JD, each of them replied with some version of “E-commerce is the future!” A vapid slogan, perhaps, but one that nonetheless reflected their awareness of a changing landscape that would define the course of their professional lives. Working for JD gave them a level of security that starting a small business, say, never could. You wouldn’t wake up to find that a multibillion-dollar company had suddenly been shuttered, one of the men said. I asked if any of them were tempted to try their luck in a big city someday, as Xia had done. “What for?” another replied. JD was going to expand, he told me, and the implication was clear: soon they could all be managing underlings of their own.