Cottagecore’s Chinese Queen Suddenly Appeared After Three Years

After more than 1,200 days of silence, Li Ziqi, arguably China’s most successful internet influencer on YouTube, suddenly I’m posting videos again.

Earlier this week, the 34-year-old content creator, known for sharing relaxing, meticulously edited clips of herself cooking traditional Chinese dishes, farming, and working on elaborate art projects, released three new videos chronicling her idyllic lifestyle. all social media channels.

In two of these, he makes an exquisitely carved handmade from scratch, as always. lacquered cabinet and a woodshed to store 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. The comment at the top of one of the clips read, “He came back when the world needed him most.”

Li, whose original name is Li Jiajia, hails from a mountainous city in southwestern China’s Sichuan province and first began posting cooking videos online under the name Li Ziqi around 2016. Her content often involves her doing things like hanging dates to dry in the sun in peace, carefully picking flower arrangements, and riding on horseback through a misty forest, often without cell phones or other modern technology.

The slow pace, soothing music, and flawless cinematography of his videos quickly turned him into a global social media star. Fans loved the idealized version of rural life that Li presented, but some viewers criticized it as overly sanitized. He 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 him one of the very few Chinese creators influential both on the Chinese internet and abroad. In 2020, The New York Times described Li as “Quarantine Queen.”

As his videos became more popular, Li became something of an unofficial cultural ambassador for China, educating Western audiences about traditional forms of Chinese art and cuisine without ever mentioning politics or human rights issues. And videos that celebrate the ideals of a slower, idyllic lifestyle fit well with The government’s rural revitalization agenda. The internet hiatus has inadvertently damaged China’s overseas image as a whole.

“Li’s decision to return to his native village and his choice to turn his new life into video content were used to promote official policy of revitalizing China’s flagging rural communities and the values ​​of economic neoliberalism, such as self-entrepreneurship and personal responsibility. ” Rui Kunze, a research fellow at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, wrote: An article dated 2024 We analyze the rise of Li Ziqi.