After greater than 1,200 days of silence, Li Ziqi, arguably essentially the most profitable web influencer from China on YouTube, is all of the sudden 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 life-style 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 cloth. In lower than a day, the movies gained virtually 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 unique 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 cell telephones or different fashionable know-how.
The gradual tempo, soothing music, and impeccable cinematography of her movies rapidly turned her right into a social media star all over the world. Followers cherished the idealized model of rural life that Li introduced, though some viewers have criticized it as overly sanitized. She has greater than 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 Instances dubbed Li a “Quarantine Queen.”
As her movies grew to become extra fashionable, Li grew to become 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 life-style additionally match effectively with the federal government’s rural revitalization agenda. Her hiatus from the web, in a manner, inadvertently broken China’s abroad picture as an entire.
“Li’s private choice to return to her residence 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 reminiscent of 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.
