After more than 1,200 days of silence, Li Ziqi, arguably the most successful Chinese internet influencer on YouTube, suddenly appears posting videos again.
Earlier this week, the 34-year-old content creator, best known for sharing calming, meticulously edited clips of herself cooking traditional Chinese dishes, growing crops, and working on elaborate art projects, posted three new videos of her bucolic lifestyle. on all your social media channels.
In two of them, she makes an exquisite carving by hand, from scratch, as always. lacquered wardrobe and a woodshed to store clothes. In the third clip, she spins, dyes and weaves silk fabrics. In less than a day, the videos garnered nearly 15 million cumulative views on YouTube. “When the world needed her most, she returned,” reads the main comment of one of the clips.
Li, whose original name is Li Jiajia, is from a mountain city in southwest China’s Sichuan province, and began posting cooking videos online around 2016 under the name Li Ziqi. Her content often shows her doing things like peacefully hanging persimmons to dry in the sun, carefully assembling flower arrangements, and riding a horse through a misty forest, all without the presence of cell phones or other modern technology.
The slow pace, relaxing music, and impeccable cinematography of her videos quickly made her a social media star around the world. Fans loved Li’s idealized version of rural life, although some viewers criticized it as too sanitized. She has more than 20 million subscribers on YouTube, which is blocked in China, and 53 million followers on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, making her one of the few Chinese content creators who are influential both on the Chinese internet. like abroad. In 2020, The New York Times dubbed Li “Quarantine queen.”
As her videos became more popular, Li became a sort of unofficial cultural ambassador for China, educating her Western audience about traditional forms of Chinese art and cuisine, without ever mentioning politics or rights issues. humans. His videos glorifying the ideals of a slower pastoral lifestyle also fits well with the government’s rural revitalization agenda. His hiatus from the Internet, in some ways, inadvertently damaged China’s image abroad as a whole.
“Li’s personal decision to return to his hometown and his decision to turn his new life into video content were exploited to promote the official policy of revitalizing China’s withering rural communities and the values of economic neoliberalism such as self-entrepreneurship and self-responsibility. “wrote Rui Kunze, a researcher at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, in a document from 2024 analyzing the rise of Li Ziqi.