After more than 1,200 days of silence, Li Ziqi, arguably the most successful internet influencer from China on YouTube, is suddenly posting videos again.
Earlier this week, the 34-year-old content creator, who is best-known for sharing soothing, meticulously edited clips of herself cooking traditional Chinese dishes, farming, and working on elaborate art projects, posted three new videos of her bucolic lifestyle to all of her social media channels.
In two of them, she handmakes—from scratch, as always—an exquisitely carved lacquer closet and a woodshed for storing clothes. In the third clip, she spins, dyes, and weaves silk fabric. In less than a day, the videos gained almost 15 million cumulative views on YouTube. “When the world needed her most, she returned,” reads the top comment on one of the clips.
Li, whose original name is Li Jiajia, is from a mountainous city in China’s southwestern Sichuan province and first started posting cooking videos online around 2016 under the name Li Ziqi. Her content often features her doing things like peacefully hanging persimmons to dry in the sun, carefully assembling flower arrangements, and riding horseback through a misty forest, all without the presence of cellphones or other modern technology.
The slow pace, soothing music, and impeccable cinematography of her videos quickly turned her into a social media star around the world. Fans loved the idealized version of rural life that Li presented, although some viewers have criticized it as overly sanitized. She currently has over 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 overseas. In 2020, The New York Times dubbed Li a “Quarantine Queen.”
As her videos became more popular, Li became an unofficial cultural ambassador of sorts for China, educating her Western audiences about traditional forms of Chinese art and cooking, without ever mentioning politics or human rights issues. Her videos glorifying the ideals of a slower, pastoral lifestyle also fit well with the government’s rural revitalization agenda. Her hiatus from the internet, in a way, inadvertently damaged China’s overseas image as a whole.
“Li’s personal decision to return to her home village and her choice to turn her 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-enterprise and self-responsibility,” Rui Kunze, a research fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, wrote in a 2024 paper analyzing the rise of Li Ziqi.
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