by YI-LING LIU
Fans from the U.S. to Bangladesh find escape in Li Ziqi’s idyllic videos. But behind the camera, she’s just another player in China’s platform economy.
On camera,Li Ziqi, one of China’s most darling vloggers, lives a peaceful, enviably pastoral life. In one video, Li spends her morning riding through a misty forest on horseback, collecting magnolia flowers in a wooden basket. Dressed in a sweeping red cape, she looks like a cross between a Disneyheroine and a mythological Chinese princess — something that taps into a current craze for traditional hanfu clothing,popular among young people nostalgic for a simpler, pre-industrial past of rites and etiquette. At her Sichuanese countryside home, off the grid and entirely self-sufficient, there are no signs of modern life: no smartphones, laptops, money, or microwaves. She returns to cook the flowers on a traditional stove fueled by dry hay, preparing magnolia pastries from scratch. “I’m hooked,” one YouTube user commented. “Straight out of a dream.”
Scenes from Li’s life — harvesting jujube dates, hatching ducklings, and simmering peach blossom wine — have mesmerized audiences around the world. She’s drawn a following of 55 million on Douyin, the local version of TikTok, and a YouTube subscriber base of 16 million (where she gained the Guinness World Records title for the most subscribers to a Chinese-language channel). She is beloved by fans from China to Portugal to Bangladesh, was named an “ambassador” of Chinese culture by the Communist Youth League, and dubbed “Quarantine Queen” by The New York Times. She is a balm for her followers’ high-pressure, screen-centric, time-constrained existences. Through her, they live vicariously in an online Eden, where pollution, industrial food chains, and coronaviruses cease to exist.
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