After more than After 1,200 days of silence, Li Ziqi, arguably the most successful Chinese internet influencer on YouTube, is posting videos again.

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

In two of them, she handcrafts – from scratch, as always – a beautifully carved lacquer closet and a pyre for storing clothes. In the third clip, she spins, dyes and weaves silk fabric. In less than a day, the videos received nearly 15 million cumulative views on YouTube. “When the world needed her most, she came back,” read the first comment on one of the clips.

Li, whose original name is Li Jiajia, is from a mountainous town in China’s southwest Sichuan province and began posting cooking videos online around 2016 under the name by Li Ziqi. Her content often shows her doing things like peacefully hanging persimmons to dry in the sun, carefully assembling flower arrangements, and riding horses through a foggy forest, all without the presence of cell phones or other devices. modern technologies.

The slow pace, soothing music, and impeccable cinematography of her videos quickly made her a social media star around the world. Fans loved the idealized version of rural life presented by Li, although some viewers criticized it as being too 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 influential Chinese content creators to both on the Chinese Internet and abroad. In 2020, The New York Times dubbed Li the “Queen of Quarantine.”

As her videos became more popular, Li became a sort of unofficial cultural ambassador for China, educating her Western audiences about traditional forms of Chinese art and cuisine, without ever mentioning politics or issues of human rights. His videos glorifying the ideals of a slower pastoral lifestyle also fit well into the government’s rural revitalization agenda. In some ways, its lack of Internet has inadvertently damaged China’s image abroad as a whole.

“Li’s personal decision to return to his native village and his choice to transform his new life into video content were exploited to promote the official policy of revitalizing China’s declining rural communities and the values ​​of economic neoliberalism such as self-reliance. -business and self-responsibility. ” Rui Kunze, a researcher at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, wrote in a 2024 article analyzing the rise of Li Ziqi.