Chinese YouTube star Li Ziqi is back. But can she beat her copycats?

Lǐ Zǐqī 李子柒, the Chinese internet celebrity known for rustic-chic videos of her idyllic life in rural Sichuan, has returned to the public eye after a two-year break amid a legal battle with her previous management agency.

Without no prior hints or promotion, Li made a return to social media on September 15 in a video posted by China Financial and Economic News, where she introduces herself as an ambassador for the China Association of Young Rural Entrepreneurial Leaders, a nonprofit organization founded by the Communist Youth League in 1988 to promote business ventures in the Chinese countryside.

In the clip, which runs nearly two minutes, Li recounts how she started as a content creator with a focus on rural lifestyle and invites viewers to join China’s efforts to advance economic developments in remote regions.

The message is very much in line with a campaign personally endorsed by Chinese leader Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 to encourage “youth to make greater contributions to rural revitalization.”

Dressed in a simple outfit and standing in an orchard, Li says, “Seven years ago, I returned to my hometown and picked up a camera to document all the ordinary yet beautiful things in the countryside.” Her goal was “to showcase farmers’ hard work, the unassuming ingredients they work with, the sound of nature, collective memories about the countryside, and a nostalgic feeling, through videos that are aesthetically pleasing.”

Calling China’s rural areas “vast and promising,” Li encourages young people to follow her steps, harnessing the power of the internet and facilitating rural rejuvenation.

While Li didn’t reveal what she’s been up to in the last two years, the 33-year-old influencer teases in the video that something new might be on the horizon. “Going forward, I will continue making more quality content to spread traditional Chinese farming culture and tell stories of rural China in my own unique way,” she vows.

The video is a brief update without much in the way of detail, but it generated a great deal of enthusiasm among her legions of fans on the Chinese internet and on YouTube. After the clip went live, news about Li’s comeback quickly took over the trending topic list on Weibo, sparking a flurry of hashtags that collectively generated millions of views.

How Li got famous

Before she fell silent, Li was one of the biggest internet celebrities in China. Born in 1990 in the southwestern province of Sichuan, Li first rose to prominence in 2015 when she started posting carefully crafted videos showing her farming, cooking, and doing crafts.

Li stood out from the crowd of Chinese food influencers with her knack for turning the ordinary, mundane life of a farmhouse into beautifully filmed videos that feel like fairy tales. The tranquil rural life portrayed in Li’s slow-paced videos — which often feature cinematic shots of her picking flowers, riding a horse, and making meals for her grandmother and other family members, all paired with soothing music but minimum talking — offered her audiences an escape from the urban bustle.

After her content took off domestically, Li made a rare leap for Chinese influencers and began sharing her content on global streaming site YouTube, which has been blocked in China since 2009. Her channel grew rapidly, especially during the pandemic, when Li’s pastoral fantasies became a reliable source of comfort and inspiration for quarantined people around the world.

At the peak of her fame, Li was followed by some 100 million worldwide. In 2020, she set a Guinness World Record for having the “most subscribers for a Chinese-language channel on YouTube” with more than 14 million followers. That number is now 17.7 million.

But in the summer of 2021, Li began a legal battle with Hangzhou Weinian, an influencer management company that ran social media campaigns for Li and managed her food brand. The business dispute was rumored to stem from Li’s dissatisfaction with the company overly monetizing her online presence, and she took a break from posting.

Over the next two years, the two parties sued and counter-sued each other a number of times, until a settlement was reached about nine months ago. Granted a full departure from Weinian, Li is now the majority stakeholder of Ziqi Culture Communication, the company that owns the intellectual property linked to her name.

Imitators and new competition

For influencers relying on regular content about personal life to keep fans interested, taking a break from posting can be career-killing. For Li, although the consequence isn’t that disastrous, the hiatus still cost her millions of followers, said MingYii Lai, a senior analyst at Daxue Consulting, a market research and strategy consulting firm focusing on the Chinese market.

During her absence, Li lost a total of 8.35 million followers across Douyin, Weibo, and Kuaishou, three major social media platforms in China. The hiatus also impacted her food brand, with its sales on Chinese ecommerce site Tmall dropping to 170 million yuan ($23.2 million) in the first half of 2022, a year-on-year decline of 51%.

The void she left behind was filled by “a surge in imitators both on a local and international scale,” Lai noted, adding that one noteworthy example is the Vietnamese content creator behind a YouTube channel known as “Bếp Trên Đỉnh Đồi,” or “Kitchen on the Hill” in English, which now has over 200,000 followers.

In China, a group of influencers specializing in content about agriculture, rural areas, and farming life has emerged, known as “three rural theme content creators” (三农领域创作者 sānnóng lǐngyù chuàngzuòzhě). Leading this crop of newcomers is “Dianxi Little Brother” (diānxī xiǎogē 滇西小哥), who produces cooking videos reminiscent of Li’s, “but with a more jovial atmosphere, often featuring interactions with other villagers and family members,” Lai said. Other popular influencers in this category include Péng Chuánmíng 彭传明, who is on a mission to revive ancient Chinese techniques related to cooking, paper making, traditional cosmetics, and farming, as well as Classmate Zhang (Zhāng Tóngxué 张同学), who has amassed a large following on Douyin with videos of situational dramas set in rural areas.

There is “a diverse landscape on Li Ziqi’s current competitors who share a similar style and content approach,” Lai told The China Project. “During her absence, Li lost the attention of her local audience. Adapting to their preferences, which now favor regular updates, presents a substantial challenge,” Lai added.

“Nonetheless, there remains optimism for upholding Li Ziqi’s influence and popularity, exemplified by her YouTube channel’s remarkable acquisition of 2.7 million new subscribers,” Lai pointed out. “This underscores the enduring appeal of her content among a worldwide audience, even in the absence of fresh content or active promotional efforts.”

Challenges ahead

So far, aside from her appearance in the government-sponsored promotional video, Li has not returned to content creation. There are reasons for Li to be cautious and take things slow, according to Lai: Without diving fully back into the influencer world, Li already had a glimpse of its dark side when her looks were widely discussed on the Chinese internet, with critics speculating that she had undergone cosmetic surgery during her retreat from the public view. Others were concerned that Li will have trouble maintaining creative freedom if she keeps working with the government.

Without the support from a full-fledged talent agency like Weinian, Li will have to come up with “sound business execution and strategic planning” to monetize her fame, said Lai. There’s also the challenge to adapt to the era of ultra-short clips, which are vastly different from Li’s relatively long videos that typically ran to around 15 minutes or more.

“Nonetheless, there remains optimism for upholding Li Ziqi’s influence and popularity, exemplified by her YouTube channel’s remarkable acquisition of 2.7 million new subscribers,” Lai said, noting that Li had dabbled in both Douyin and TikTok before her disappearance, which suggests that the uber-influencer is not averse to experimenting with different formats. “As for content, her videos carry significant emotional value for its calm and meditative features. Coupled with the current surge in national pride and the guócháo 国潮 [“national wave”] trend, her revival of Chinese ancient techniques and calm portrayal of the countryside is likely to continue resonating with her local and overseas audience.”