To help promote local peaches, a vice-mayor of Zaoyang city in Central China's Hubei province joined a recent livestream, which managed to sell 100 tons of the fruit within two hours.

Zaoyang is renowned for its peaches, but sales have been sluggish in recent years due to limited marketing resources.

"The result was way beyond my expectations," said Vice-Mayor Xing Hongli who participated in the online promotion with local peach farmers, delivery men and other officials.

Besides livesteaming, the Zaoyang government also teamed up with Juhuasuan, a group purchasing arm of Alibaba, China's largest e-commerce platform, to sell the peaches through the platform. Zaoyang also worked with the Shanghai Animation Film Studio to use the image of the famous Chinese cartoon character the Monkey King as part of a branding campaign for the peaches.

Huang Rui in Beijing contributed to this story.