China has made solid progress in building e-commerce demonstration bases in recent years, data from the ministry of commerce showed. By the end of 2020, the country had formulated 127 such bases, which housed a total of 73,500 e-commerce companies. The number of companies increased by 12.9 percent from a year earlier, said the ministry. The total e-commerce transaction volume at these bases reached 6.37 trillion yuan (about 982 billion US dollars) last year, up 13.3 percent year on year, according to the ministry. Emphasising the demonstration bases’ role in creating jobs and reducing poverty, the ministry said that these bases had over 1.51 million employees by the end of 2020, with 97,600 of them being migrant workers.