Who would not want a social media audience that grows without new content? During the three years she paused production of her short do-it-yourself (DIY) farmer’s lifestyle videos, Chinese vlogger Li Ziqi (李子柒), 34, has seen her YouTube subscribers increase to 20.2 million from about 14 million.
While YouTube is banned in China, her fan base there — although not the size of YouTube’s MrBeast, who has 330 million subscribers — is close to 100 million across the country’s social media platforms Douyin (抖音), Sina Weibo (新浪微博) and Xiaohongshu (小紅書).
When Li finally released new videos last week — ending what has been described as a “mysterious” absence — the response was rapturous in China and around the world. On YouTube alone, the initial video amassed 11 million views in its first three days.
Photo: Bloomberg
Her disappearance was not so much mysterious as indicative of the interplay of business and politics. She appears to have outmaneuvered the obstacles that led her to quit in the first place, all while gently expressing what Americans might call an “aw shucks” patriotism along the way.
The often staid state-run Xinhua news agency does not pay much attention to social media influences, but has issued its imprimatur with an 11-minute segment with her. The interviewer appeared a little lost as Li detailed an allergy to the lacquer she had concocted — indeed, tapping the trees herself for the toxic sap — to renovate her grandmother’s decrepit wooden wardrobe.
“My face got as big as a TV set,” Li said, describing the swelling, while recalling the failure of her first efforts at the elaborate gift for the older woman, with whom she lives in the countryside of Sichuan Province.
That kind of homespun family piety is at the heart of Li’s appeal. Her videos are not really DIY as much as meditations on the simple life — which is not really easy. That is why there is comfort in seeing someone as slight as Li do it all. I am not sure I would know how to safely tap lacquer trees from watching the footage.
Instead, the little films produce a quiet euphoria, perhaps akin to autonomous sensory meridian response, a tingling of the body and soul that provides deep satisfaction. They are as addictive as Martha Stewart or Julia Child guiding you through the intricacies of assembling a Thanksgiving dinner.
However, Li does not talk to the audience. Her content is in Chinese — or rather, Chinese is spoken in the craftily edited videos that have no narrator and yet have narrative. You do not need to know a word to understand what is happening. That subtlety is a novel and successful approach to the millennia-old Chinese tradition of learning from humble folk.
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong (毛澤東) harked back to it when he declared that “it is very necessary for the educated youth to go to the countryside and undergo re-education by poor peasants.”
In most of her videos, Li and her grandmother live the peasant life. She is politically correct without being politically preachy.
Li’s reasons for the three-year hiatus are not particularly bucolic, so it is no surprise she does not talk about them. Most reports indicate a business conflict with her agent, Hangzhou Weinian Brand Management (杭州味年品牌管理), which signed her in 2016 to improve the quality of the videos she had begun posting the year before. They established a partnership in which Weinian held 51 percent of ownership and Li 49 percent.
E-commerce sales of food and sauces — branded with her name — reportedly brought in about US$220 million in 2020. News reports said that Li was unhappy about the commercialization.
In any case, she appears to have had the better strategy. She sued Weinian in July 2021. As the dispute progressed, Li gave a brief interview alluding to her desire to live a simple farmer’s life in the country’s “new socialism” and participate in the “common prosperity” being promoted by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). In early 2022, she stopped uploading new videos.
All that might have led one big investor to divest from her brand manager. That would be ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), the Beijing-based parent of TikTok (where she has more than 3 million followers). By the end of 2022 (and an undisclosed court decision in Sichuan), Li’s percentages in the partnership were reconfigured: She now owns 99 percent to Weinian’s 1 percent.
Why, then, did it take more than a year and a half after the settlement to make new videos? The lacquer allergy reportedly contributed a year’s delay. The production values of the new offerings were likely complex and involved (just look at the first three).
Li also was lucky with the timing. In the intervening period, one big potential rival emerged: Sister Yu (東北雨姐) from China’s cold northeast. Where Li was demure, Sister Yu was a bulldozer. She drew Chinese fans who were attracted by her rural forthrightness and devotion to her cowed husband.
However, last month, Sister Yu and her company were fined US$225,000 for fraudulent claims — she said her self-branded noodles were made of sweet potato when they were actually tapioca.
One of Li’s core strengths is her humility. Still, it is unclear know what her followers would think of her latest output. It is a gorgeous production, with Li making silk flowers from scratch — from raising silkworms on. However, it ends with her singing and playing a grand piano in the middle of a countryside meadow, dressed in a glamorous brocade gown of lime green embroidery on a white gold background.
It is fittingly triumphant, but the simple life is looking pretty posh.
Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business. He previously served as Bloomberg Opinion’s international editor and is a former news director at Time magazine. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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