After more than 1200 days of silence, Li Ziqi, perhaps China’s most successful internet influencer on YouTube, suddenly posted 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 intricate art projects, posted three new videos of her bucolic way of life across all her social media channels.
In two of them, she handcrafts—from scratch, as always—an exquisitely carved lacquer wardrobe and a wood shed for storing clothes. In the third clip, she spins, dyes and weaves silk fabric. In less than a day, the videos garnered almost 15 million views on YouTube. “When the world needed her the most, she came back,” reads the top comment on one of the clips.
Li, whose original name is Li Jiajia, is from a mountain town in southwest China’s 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 a persimmon to dry in the sun, carefully assembling flower arrangements, and riding a horse through a misty forest, all without the presence of cell phones or other modern technology.
The slow tempo, soothing music and flawless cinematography of her videos quickly made her a social media star worldwide. Fans loved the idealized version of rural life that Li presented, although some viewers criticized it as too 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 few Chinese content creators who are influential both on the Chinese Internet and abroad. In 2020 The New York Times called Li the “Queen of Quarantine.”
As her videos have grown in popularity, Li has become something of an unofficial cultural ambassador for China, educating her Western audience about traditional Chinese art forms and cooking without ever mentioning politics or human rights issues. Her videos celebrating the ideals of a slower, pastoral lifestyle also fit well with the government’s rural revitalization agenda. Her internet outage somehow inadvertently hurt China’s overall image overseas.
“Li’s personal decision to return to her home village and her choice to turn her new life into video content were used to promote the official policy of revitalizing China’s dying rural communities and the values of economic neoliberalism such as self-entrepreneurship and personal responsibility, ” Rui Kunze, a research associate at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, wrote in a 2024 article analyzing the rise of Li Ziqi.
