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 cell phones 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 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 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.
Li disappeared from the internet in 2021 shortly before becoming embroiled in a legal dispute with her marketing agency, Hangzhou Willing (or Weinian in Chinese), over the rights to her personal brand and the profits from selling merchandise. Between 2016 and 2021, Weinian was in charge of marketing Li’s videos and, more importantly, overseeing the production and sales of her affiliated snacks and instant food products.
On July 14, 2021, Li posted her last video on social media. A month later, she uploaded a since-deleted post to Oasis, the Instagram-like sister app of Weibo, in which she claimed to fans that she had filed a police report, but it was unclear against whom or for what. In October that year, Li sued Weinian for unpaid profits from her businesses and demanded the firm transfer ownership of its ecommerce stores bearing her name. The next year, Weinian sued her back. The two parties argued over several issues related to shareholder rights, unfair competition, and trademark infringement. At the time, Weinian maintained a 51 percent controlling stake in a holding company created to manage Li’s trademarks.
Eventually, the Chinese government intervened and helped Li and Weinian settle their cases with one another. “Directed by the People’s Court and supported by local political and jurisdiction offices, the two sides finally signed a cooperation memorandum in December 2022 and reached an agreement,” reported the state media paper affiliated with the court system in Sichuan.
It seems like each side decided to take a step back. According to corporate filings from earlier this year, Li now has a 99 percent stake in the company that controls her trademarks. Weinian, however, still owns an immensely popular food product line that has Li Ziqi’s name on it. Weinian and Li did not immediately respond to requests for comment from WIRED. But Weinian told Chinese media recently that it no longer works with Li Ziqi other than managing the merchandise under her name brand.
Even after her case was settled, Li remained silent online for years. Until this week, she largely appeared only in offline events, mostly organized by local government agencies as her relationship with the Chinese state became more formalized. She was given the title of “ambassador of Sichuan’s farming culture” and is featured on the homepage of the China Association of Young Rural Entrepreneurial Leaders. Last month, she appeared in a video promoting “Panda Week,” an annual event organized by the party-owned social media platform Xuexi Qiangguo.
The day after Li came back, China’s state-owned news agency Xinhua published a sit-down interview with her, asking what her next steps would be. Li said she spent the past month editing the three videos she uploaded. More are in the works, but she said they won’t be published at a regular cadence. She plans to focus on promoting China’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage” arts, which would get in the way of her being a full-time influencer.
Along with her fans, Chinese state media has also embraced Li’s return. The website of the People’s Daily newspaper reported that her focus on Chinese traditional lacquer-making techniques would “further promote the international communication of Chinese traditional culture.” Zhang Heqing, the Chinese cultural counselor at the Embassy of China in Pakistan and a prolific poster on X, responded to one of Li’s videos on Tuesday, saying “[I] like it so much.”
Source : Wired
