After more than 1,200 days of silence, Li Ziqi, arguably China’s most successful YouTube influencer, suddenly becomes… reposting videos.
Earlier this week, the 34-year-old content creator, best known for sharing soothing, carefully edited clips of her cooking time-honored Chinese dishes, farming and working on elaborate art projects, posted three up-to-date videos showcasing her idyllic lifestyle across her media channels social media.
In two of them, he makes exquisite carvings by hand – as always, from scratch paint cabinet ia woodshed for storing clothes. In the third clip, she spins, dyes and weaves silk fabric. In less than a day, the videos gained a total of almost 15 million views on YouTube. “When the world needed her the most, she came back,” we read in the top comment under 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 shows her calmly hanging persimmons to droughty in the sun, carefully assembling flower arrangements, and riding a horse through a foggy forest, all without cell phones or other up-to-date technology.
The sluggish pace, soothing music and impeccable cinematography of her videos quickly made her a social media star around the world. Fans liked Li’s idealized version of rural life, although some viewers 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, China’s version of TikTok, making her one of the few Chinese content creators with influence both on the Chinese internet and abroad. In 2020, The Modern York Times called Li “Queen of quarantine“
As her films became increasingly popular, Li became a sort of unofficial cultural ambassador to China, educating her Western audiences about time-honored Chinese art forms and cooking, without ever mentioning politics or human rights issues. Her films also extol the ideals of a slower, pastoral lifestyle fits well government program for revitalization of rural areas. Her internet hiatus has, in some ways, unintentionally damaged China’s entire foreign image.
“Li’s personal decision to return to his home village and the decision to transform his new life into video content have been used to promote the official policy of revitalizing China’s dying rural communities and the values of economic neoliberalism such as self-reliance and responsibility,” wrote Rui Kunze, a research fellow at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg article from 2024 analyzing Li Ziqi’s development.