After more than 1,200 days of silence, Li Ziqi, perhaps China's most successful internet influencer on YouTube, suddenly posting video again,
Earlier this week, the 34-year-old content creator, known for sharing soothing, carefully edited clips of cooking traditional Chinese dishes, farming and working on elaborate art projects, posted three new videos of her busy lifestyle . All her social media channels.
In two of them, she handmade from scratch as always – an excellent carving. lacquer room and a wooden shed For storing clothes. In the third clip, she spins, dyes and weaves silk fabric. In less than a day, the video received nearly 15 million cumulative views on YouTube. The top comment on one clip reads, “When the world needed her most, she returned.”
Li, whose original name is Li Jiajia, is from a mountainous town in China's southwestern Sichuan province and first began posting cooking videos online around 2016 under the name Li Ziqi. Her content often shows her peacefully hanging persimmons to dry in the sun, carefully assembling flower arrangements, and riding horseback through a misty forest, all while doing this without the presence of a cell phone or other modern technology. .
The slow pace, soothing music and impeccable cinematography of his videos instantly turned him into a social media star around the world. Fans liked the idealized version of rural life presented by Lee, although some viewers have criticized it as overly 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 very few Chinese content creators who are influential both on the Chinese internet and abroad. In 2020, The New York Times described Lee as “quarantine queen,
As her videos became more popular, Li became an unofficial cultural ambassador for China, educating her Western audiences about Chinese art and traditional forms of cooking, never mentioning politics or human rights issues. Without. His videos also glorify the ideals of a slow, rustic lifestyle fits well with Rural revival agenda of the government. Their isolation from the Internet, in a way unintentionally, harmed China's foreign image as a whole.
“Li's personal decision to return to his home village and his decision to turn his new life into video content capitalize on China's official policy of revitalizing declining rural communities and economic neoliberalism values such as self-enterprise and self-responsibility. Rui Kunze, a research fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, wrote. a paper of 2024 Analysis of the rise of Li Ziqi.