After greater than 1,200 days of silence, Li Ziqi, arguably probably the most profitable web influencer from China on YouTube, is out of the blue posting movies once more.
Earlier this week, the 34-year-old content material creator, who’s best-known for sharing soothing, meticulously edited clips of herself cooking conventional Chinese language dishes, farming, and dealing on elaborate artwork initiatives, posted three new movies of her bucolic way of life to all of her social media channels.
In two of them, she handmakes—from scratch, as at all times—an exquisitely carved lacquer closet and a woodshed for storing garments. Within the third clip, she spins, dyes, and weaves silk material. In lower than a day, the movies gained nearly 15 million cumulative views on YouTube. “When the world wanted her most, she returned,” reads the highest touch upon one of many clips.
Li, whose authentic identify is Li Jiajia, is from a mountainous metropolis in China’s southwestern Sichuan province and first began posting cooking movies on-line round 2016 beneath the identify Li Ziqi. Her content material typically options her doing issues like peacefully hanging persimmons to dry within the solar, fastidiously assembling flower preparations, and using horseback via a misty forest, all with out the presence of cellphones or different fashionable expertise.
The sluggish tempo, soothing music, and impeccable cinematography of her movies shortly turned her right into a social media star all over the world. Followers beloved the idealized model of rural life that Li offered, though some viewers have criticized it as overly sanitized. She at present has over 20 million subscribers on YouTube, which is blocked in China, and 53 million followers on Douyin, the Chinese language model of TikTok, making her one of many only a few Chinese language content material creators who’re influential each on the Chinese language web and abroad. In 2020, The New York Occasions dubbed Li a “Quarantine Queen.”
As her movies turned extra common, Li turned an unofficial cultural ambassador of types for China, educating her Western audiences about conventional types of Chinese language artwork and cooking, with out ever mentioning politics or human rights points. Her movies glorifying the beliefs of a slower, pastoral way of life additionally match properly with the federal government’s rural revitalization agenda. Her hiatus from the web, in a manner, inadvertently broken China’s abroad picture as a complete.
“Li’s private choice to return to her dwelling village and her selection to show her new life into video content material have been exploited to advertise the official coverage of revitalizing China’s withering rural communities and the values of financial neoliberalism akin to self-enterprise and self-responsibility,” Rui Kunze, a analysis fellow on the College of Erlangen-Nuremberg, wrote in a 2024 paper analyzing the rise of Li Ziqi.
