This article studies how the new cultural form of food vlogging intervenes the perennial debate on tradition and modernity by focusing on the case of Li Ziqi, whose cinematic videos celebrating bucolic life won her popularity in China and overseas. A study of the production and reception of Li’s videos not only shows urbanites’ nostalgia for a pastoral way of life but also reveals the role played by the more structural forces—that is, the market and the state—in appropriating and managing the desire for and consumption of the pastoral for the construction of modern identities—both individually as a consumer and collectively as a nation. The market forces, including the ideology of consumerism, its attendant aesthetics, and the entire regime of social media marketing, were present throughout Li’s celebrification. Meanwhile, the state became involved after Li’s rise to fame, when it became aware of her value for domestic and international publicity. If the market promotes a narrative that caters to the “aesthetical turn” in everyday life in a consumer society, the state’s validation and appropriation of Li points to a cultural nationalism that departs from political nationalism and is more commensurate with consumerism. However, the Chinese state also tries to transcend the market discourse, whose egalitarian form conceals substantive inequality by positioning itself as an integrative force that bridges the urban-rural gap. By making Li Ziqi a social media phenomenon, the market uses the rural as a resource to meet the urban desire for authenticity while the Chinese state reappropriates the icon of marketized media in its “rural rejuvenation” design to help the disadvantaged rural other regain its agency.
Raymond Williams uses the term “structure of feeling” to capture the coexistence of permanent human desires and the historicity of the social form in the evolution of the country and the city. “In country and city, physically present and substantial, the experience finds material which gives body to the thoughts.”
While the transition from traditional to modern society saw “a victory of town over country”
Meanwhile, with an egalitarian ideology that valorizes the everyday experience of the average person, the social media era lends new cultural forms to the expression of these permanently conflicting human feelings and desires. Vlogging, for instance, empowers the grassroots rural population so that they need no longer be represented by professional media but can give voice to their own needs and represent their own lives. This gives rise to a microcelebrity phenomenon such as Li Ziqi, a Chinese vlogger whose cinematic videos celebrating bucolic life won her popularity in China and overseas.
Li started filming her life in her rural hometown in southwestern China’s Sichuan province in 2015 and gradually built her social media presence. By 2019 she had become a household name. Today she has a huge following on every major social media platform based in China, such as the leading microblogging site of Weibo (27.57 million followers) and Bilibili, a popular video-sharing site (7.92 million followers). Her videos show her preparing exquisite meals using garden-fresh ingredients and traditional techniques. The picture-perfect rural scenery in Sichuan’s mountainous areas, the organic food, and the peaceful pastoral life she shares with her grandmother are all key elements of her appeal, particularly for urban dwellers, who constitute the majority of Internet users in China today.
By studying the rise of Li Ziqi, this paper adds to the perennial debate over tradition and modernity in contemporary China. How does the new media form of food vlogging construct Li’s double roles as a farmer and a microcelebrity and maintain her authenticity? What is the uniqueness of Li that led to her popularity? Situating the Li phenomenon in the larger political-economic context, what are the roles of the market and the state in her celebrification? Finally, how does food vlogging represent or negotiate the power relations between the country and the city for a society going through rapid modernization such as China? These are the questions that this paper tries to answer. For an analysis of the narrative strategies adopted by Li Ziqi, I immersed myself in viewing Li’s content on her Bilibili and YouTube channels before zeroing on one particular episode (“The Life of Wheat”) for a closer analysis. I also gathered the top twenty comments under each of the top ten most-watched videos from Li Ziqi’s Bilibili and YouTube channels to gain an idea on how domestic and overseas viewers react to her content. Finally, I drew extensively from the media coverage on Li along her road to fame and on the rural rejuvenation plan proposed by the Chinese government to explore the links between the Li Ziqi phenomenon and the influence from larger structural forces, including the market and the state.
Li Ziqi grew up in a village near the city of Mianyang in the Sichuan province. She had a miserable childhood. Her parents divorced when she was very young. Her father then passed away and her stepmother mistreated her. Her grandparents brought her under their roof and raised her.
At first, Li’s videos averaged around five minutes and featured only food preparation or handicraft making. In 2017, Li began to partner with Hangzhou-based Weinian Technology Inc., an MCN (multichannel network) that specializes in the celebrification of up-and-coming social media influencers.
By 2018, Li’s average video length doubled as the production quality improved in storytelling, cinematography, and editing. She extended the scope of her lens to cover the entire life cycle of food production. In her videos, she grows and harvests staples and vegetables or gathers wild food ingredients from her beautiful natural surroundings before she demonstrates her exquisite cooking skills. In addition to the enriched rural theme, her stories began to center on family relationships, foregrounding her role as a filial granddaughter. Li gradually established herself as an iconic vlogger representing an idyllic pastoral life.
However, the rise of Li has not been universally acclaimed, particularly within China. It has been accompanied by controversy ranging from criticism that she beautifies the country to reservations if her content contributes to China’s soft power because it represents a “backward China,” and from early suspicion that her content production involved media professionals
Occupying the opposite ends of the material spectrum, food and media technologies form an interesting comparison in their relationship to the country and the city. As both nature’s bounty and the product of human labor through agriculture, food is the fundamental material source that sustains human life. As such, it is intimately associated with rural life, given its rootedness in land, and with city life, which it nourishes. Food’s unique position on the interstice between the country and the city makes it an ideal fetish that mediates urban-rural relations. Embodying the paradoxical nature of all rituals, food simultaneously “defines inclusion and encourages solidarity”
Meanwhile, mass media, as material instruments for symbolic production and dissemination on a massive scale, mark the epitome of technological development, which is humanity’s intervention in nature that has thrived under urban civilization. Mass media fulfil individual needs for impersonal sources of information in a society that is no longer bound by small kinship-based communities but by instrumentality and division of labor. At the same time, mass media help cultivate identities and foster a sense of solidarity through creating an “imagined community.”
Given food and media’s complex connection to the country, the city, and the notion of authenticity, when food becomes a media theme, it is an especially interesting window for studying urban-rural relations of a society. According to Laura Lindenfeld, “Food and media condition the consumption of each other and thus form a locus of struggle and contestation where various kinds of cultural work gets done.”
Since commercialization is the underlying logic that defines media in most parts of the world today, food media’s intervention in cultural politics is inevitably bound up with the role played by the market. To date, food media genres are predominantly consumption oriented and implicitly urban centered—that is, they favor commercialized media aesthetics in which the authenticity of identity is achieved through consumption. Among them, different genres target specifically classed consumers. For instance, food films within the international art house genre cater to the upper-middle class’s pursuit of cultural capital by “cultivating a ‘popular connoisseurship’ in matters of taste” while advertisements of ethnic-themed restaurants appeal to middle-class sensibilities by emphasizing close kinship ties.
Meanwhile, food media also intersects with the influence of the state. The turn toward “banal nationalism”
Yang’s study of the popular food-themed documentary series
With the penetration of market influence, the documentary seems to bear no trace of the state. But the state made its voice heard after the series’ success, when senior cultural officials hailed it as an exemplar of original content with success in the international audio-visual market and hence a contributor to China’s soft power. Here, the state morphed from its former role as a mobilizer of politicized culture to a cheerleader in a commercialized cultural field.
Interestingly, the key elements of
A compelling story usually requires ingredients such as “moral agonism” and “twisting and turning in plots.”
Take an episode from her staples series, “The Life of Wheat,” as an example. In the nineteen-minute video, the first seven minutes are devoted to the cultivation of wheat. While the growth cycle is long and involves strenuous work, under Li’s lens, farming life acquires a poetic language. The cultivation process is distilled into key moments surrounding particular solar terms. It starts with Li planting the wheat seeds on a windy autumn day, moving swiftly through the sprouting of green shoots around “Light Snow (小雪),” with the use of time-lapse devices and extreme close-up shots, to a scene of the maturing wheat field near the “Spring Equinox (春分)” the next year, with lush green plump ears of wheat glowing in the sun.
The highlights in the segment on wheat production feature the harvesting season at “the Beginning of Summer (立夏),” which foregrounds intense yet fulfilling labor. The ripened wheat field looked like undulating amber waves under the morning sun as Li and the aunties in the village who joined her in the harvest frantically waved their sickles, leaving a neat swath behind them (see
Pan shot of the wheat field.
Harvesting in the wheat field.
Part of the sequence is in fast motion to enhance viewer sensation. This is juxtaposed with scenes of Li and aunties singing, dancing, and laughing aloud in the field. After a day’s backbreaking work, Li treated the aunties with wine and a bountiful feast made of fresh produce from her farm. The close neighborly ties are conveyed when Li parted with the aunties: “Call me if you need my help in the field.” The harvesting segment is followed by scenes of reaping, threshing, and winnowing in Li’s backyard. Premodern tools are chosen for these procedures instead of a combine, to underscore that traditional farming techniques are preserved (see
Traditional way of threshing.
Winnowing in the sun.
The rest of the episode moved from food production to preparation, in which Li demonstrated her genius as a jack-of-all-trades in turning every part of wheat into something delicious or useful. She wove wheat stalk into straw hats, made malt paintings from germinated grains, used the remaining grains to feed poultry or nourish plants, and turned freshly grounded flour into a feast of delicacies, including fried dough twist, cold rice noodles, steamed meat bun, roasted gluten, and so on. The segment adopted the form of TV cooking programs, with midrange or close-up shots to showcase the freshness of the food ingredients as well as the dexterity of her culinary skills. The camerawork was meticulous. Some viewers even likened her kitchen shots to famous paintings such as Vermeer’s “Milkmaid” (see
Making
Viewers also resonate with the interaction between Ziqi and her grandmother, such as a scene in which her granny was asked to spin a wheel to choose a pattern for the malt painting: “The grandmother’s laugh at the drawing spin was the sweetest!” (see
Granny and maltose painting.
Enjoying the feast.
The incorporation of food-production scenes into consumption is what distinguishes Li Ziqi from most consumption-oriented food vloggers. These scenes convey the toil and joy of farmers when cultivating, harvesting, processing, and enjoying the fruits of their labor. But despite a conscientious effort to foreground the labor motif, her videos idealize pastoral life while papering over any actual social, economic, or political struggles going on in the village. Faithful to the life of a farmer, her videos emphasize the essential farming techniques. But at the same time, Li is playing the role of an archetypal farmer. The script selects and organizes certain elements of village life for presentation and turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. In celebrating the pastoral idyll, a life of abundance, and the harmony among villagers and between villagers and nature, it fails to mention, for instance, that the village remains poor in the region.
According to Helene Shugart, “In a consumer landscape increasingly characterized by artifice, replication, transience, and superficiality, the quest for novelty and uniqueness is endowed with greater market value.”
By turning both food production and preparation into a media spectacle, authentic labor becomes a media commodity capable of generating profits in terms of both social media user subscriptions (here, Li’s videos are seen as a form of cultural content) and advertisements by platform sponsors (here, the audience attention garnered by Li’s videos becomes another form of commodity). Further, Li’s videos are a direct form of advertising for her brand merchandise, which is her primary source of revenue. The mass production of her brand items, such as lotus powder and snail rice noodles, is outsourced to other manufacturers, except that they are sold at much higher prices than lesser-known brands. When Li’s e-store selling food and handicrafts opened on T-Mall, China’s largest e-commerce platform, in 2018, her sales exceeded 10 million RMB yuan within just three days. During the “Double 11” (“November 11”) Shopping Festival of 2019, her sales topped 80 million yuan.
In food films, authenticity always entails simplicity and wholeness and is associated with land made distant by time or space.
In addition, Li’s life is isolated from those of her fans. Unlike most social media influencers who have to constantly update their accounts to retain web traffic, Li has few videos (128 in total on YouTube) and updates infrequently, partly as a result of the long production cycle involved in making one episode. While other vloggers frequently interact with their followers, Li Ziqi rarely directly communicates with her fans and seldom gives interviews. She is known as one of China’s most mysterious microcelebrities.
Therefore, even as mobility and interactivity characterize the era of social media, Li Ziqi’s identity as a microcelebrity speaks more to a retrenchment rooted in the local. Her identity is better described as a returnee to the countryside. A similar pattern can be found in the protagonists of major food films, such as
This said, Li’s experience in the city is indispensable to her eventual rise as a famous vlogger. Those years away from home arguably acquainted her with the taste of urbanites. (While working as a DJ in a bar, she was in a position to observe the leisurely urban lifestyle up close.) In the city, she initially remained obscure as one among millions of migrant workers. But after internalizing urban middle-class taste by tapping into her rural identity through vlogging, she started to make a name for herself. Still, her popularity did not soar until after her partnership with a well-known MCN—a new kind of intermediary born in the social media age and the city.
If Li’s retrenchment of identity facilitated by the mobility of social media gave her success, the same technology, when combined with the
The elevation of Li Ziqi to a cultural phenomenon has a lot to do with her huge success on YouTube, which seems more total than her domestic appeal. Each of the ten most-watched videos on her YouTube channel accumulates views ranging from 18.72 to 55.08 million, and some attract comments well over fifty thousand. To have an idea of how overseas viewer reaction may differ from those of domestic viewers, I gathered the top twenty comments under each of the top ten most-watched videos from Li Ziqi’s Bilibili channel and YouTube channel. While both samples seem overwhelmingly positive upon first reading, they show interesting differences when I start to look for references to any existing controversy concerning Li Ziqi. In other words, a comment may be coded as positive but is written in a way that explicitly defends Li against her critics. While only 4 percent of the comments from the YouTube sample refer to any kind of controversy over authenticity, about 28 percent of the comments in the Bilibili sample point to the existence of a wider debate.
The YouTube comments focus more on the immediate textual meanings offered by Li’s videos than on interrogating the structural factors that inform her video production. A majority of comments converge on praising Li’s versatility, especially her culinary skills, and treating the videos as a DIY manual (e.g., “Liziqi channel is like an entertaining documentary + plant life lessons + farming lessons + heritage lessons + lifestyle tips all in a way that will make you love learning and working”; “As a Chef myself for the last 40 years, she’s my IRON CHEF. Her selection and presentation are amazingly simple yet elegant. Certainly, if she were to have cooking classes or books, they would definitely be top notch”; and “I have insurmountable respect and admiration for this woman … the fact that she’s bringing back to life an archaic way of doing things. Because of her I’ve learned a lot about culture … and gained several new skills.”). Many are equally fascinated by the natural scenery presented (“If I die and go to heaven, this is what I want my heaven to look like”). For one thing, Li’s village scenes lack a specific geographical marker. In fact, only 3 percent of the YouTube comments in the sample mention the words “China” or “Chinese.” It is possible that the YouTube viewers are more drawn to the aesthetic value presented by Li’s videos as a form of leisurely consumption than are concerned with the social economic reality confronting her as an actual farmer.
On the other hand, if we probe into the comments in the Bilibili sample that indicate controversy over Li’s authenticity, coupled with a brief survey of the coverage of Li Ziqi during her rise to fame by the Chinese language press, we find that in 2017 there was a heated debate over whether Li’s content was faithful to rural reality and whether she was true to her “one-woman-show” brand or had enlisted professional support. In 2018, upon the opening of Li’s e-shop on T-Mall, the controversy shifted to whether commercialization compromised her authenticity. Finally, at the end of 2019, the debate was over whether her videos constituted a successful form of Chinese cultural export.
For sure, Li’s portrayal of an idealized country still appeals to millions of Chinese, especially those who try to escape the stress of modern metropolitan life. It may even be said that those who resonate with her vlogging the most, and who find her videos invoking a strong feeling of nostalgia, are rural emigrants to the city. In fact, this viewer niche authors some of the most emotion-fraught comments on Li’s vlogging channel. To them, it is enough that the videos bear narrative fidelity to the countryside of their childhood memories. However, to others, a mere appreciation of the cultural truth conveyed by Li’s videos in the form of an idealized pastoral life seems inadequate. For one thing, Chinese viewers have ready access to alternative discourses on rural China that compete with Li’s representation. Among others, there are the “carnivalesque rural China” invoked through the Tuwei subculture, the “decaying rural China” illustrated by realist-themed films and literary works, which underline deeper social problems such as population exodus and a struggling rural economy, and state-run China Central Television Chanel 17 (CCTV-17) devoted to agricultural programming, which seeks to portray the country realistically but with an upbeat tone. When these diverse discourses vie for public attention, it is more difficult for one version to triumph as the most authentic image of rural China.
As such, Chinese social media users are more likely to be concerned about the immediate social environment and the structural conditions that inform Li Ziqi’s video production and her rise to fame. When viewers with firsthand rural knowledge contend that Li’s beautification of the country glosses over the struggles of farmers in their daily lives, or when they challenge that the use of professional media expertise or outright commercialization contaminates Li’s authenticity as a vlogger, they are not only concerned about the fidelity of Li’s performance with a quintessential Chinese cultural script but are interrogating the “empirical credibility” and “experiential commensurability”
When the market fails to adequately address the urban-rural conflict in Chinese reality, the state can make a difference. A December 2019 debate on social media over whether Li Ziqi constituted a positive form of Chinese cultural export led to the state’s involvement in the Li phenomenon. A major criticism against Li in the debate was that, since she showcased the “backwardness” of rural China, her vlogging should not qualify as an exemplar of Chinese culture.
Key social media influencers soon came to Li’s defense. An article by Internet opinion leader Lei Siling that first appeared on WeChat on December 5 and gained millions of views and pulled in 63,000 comments overnight summarized well the views in support of Li.
The state media were also quick to endorse. It was the first time a microcelebrity broke into the official discourse on soft power. China Central Television and the Communist Party organ People’s Daily both lavished Li with praise, believing that her popularity in the West would make the nation more appealing. The CCTV commentary goes, “Without a word praising China, Li tells a good China story.”
This online debate pertains to the larger theoretical question on tradition versus modernity in China and the official stance on it. Here, the state’s subsequent involvement in the Li Ziqi phenomenon bespeaks a kind of “cultural nationalism” that is, to some extent, commensurate with, but also transcends, the consumerist discourse promoted by market modernity. In doing so, the state draws on alternative ideological resources, including both Confucianism and Chinese communism.
Confucianism was the dominant ruling ideology throughout China’s agrarian history. While Confucius as an intellectual had a rather condescending attitude toward farming, Confucianism as a school of thought enjoined the feudal state to attach great importance to agriculture. Historically it was a common practice for Chinese officials at various levels, even the emperor, to engage in “quan nong (劝农)” activities (i.e., activities to promote agriculture), such as the ritual of “gong geng” (i.e., 躬耕, tilling by oneself to set an example for farmers), so that the laboring class would be dedicated to their undertakings.
Confucianism lost its sway after the May Fourth Movement and the Communist Revolution. While communism, adopting a singular vision of modernization, saw urban life as a higher form of society (in a rare instance in which capitalists were given credit, Marx said, “The bourgeoisie had rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life”)
After the cultural revolution, the party reoriented itself and embraced market economy while sticking to political authoritarianism, leading to a loss of ideological hegemony. The successive party leaderships resorted to nationalism to fill the ideological vacuum and drew from the rich Chinese traditions to buttress their legitimacy. The Confucius revival since the start of the twenty-first century placed state-led nationalism on a broad, popular footing.
These developments point to the complex role of the contemporary Chinese state in mediating tradition and modernity. Its policy of pursuing a market economy and urbanization-driven development has led to the marginalization of the country. Meanwhile, in embracing the commodification of culture, the party-state is no longer an agitator in a Maoist-style politicized culture but more of a cheerleader in a demobilized culture driven by the market. However, the widening urban-rural gap impedes further growth, and once again rural development is elevated to strategic importance. By tapping into the symbolic power of Li Ziqi in her double identity as a farmer and as a social media celebrity, the state positions itself as a mediator of tradition and modernity and, by extension, of the urban-rural conflicts.
As a food and lifestyle vlogger, Li’s defining role is a farmer. Food connotes intimacy to soil, active cultivation, and a vital source of life for the city. Indeed, food security is the most fundamental concern facing every nation. Here, Li seems well poised as the poster girl of the party’s policy priority to rejuvenate the rural area. She has since been recruited into a number of government initiatives to alleviate rural poverty, including her appointment as an “ambassador” to a Communist Youth League-sponsored campaign to help rural youth become rich and her participation in the Chinese Farmers’ Festival sponsored by the Ministry of Agriculture. This opens a new chapter in the good old party practice of setting up a grassroots role model to serve the socialist cause. A
For instance, in one project, the website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection enlisted Li’s video on rice farming to promote the party’s “Clean the Plate” campaign against food waste,
This said, Li’s initiation to the country’s role model does form a sharp contrast to the fate awaiting those microcelebrities who are linked to the “rural” in a pejorative sense—that is, the Tuwei livestreamers who became popular by posing themselves as gluttons and who were seen to represent a perverse form of consumerism and the opposite to values like thrift. While Li Ziqi was being elevated by officials, the propaganda authorities closed in on livestreamers who performed binge eating to attract online traffic. In any case, the state enlists the power of the market in celebrity manufacturing in its fight against excessive consumption, even as its official policy implicitly endorses consumerism.
The other part of the state’s validation of Li is more directly related to her role as a social media influencer in promoting traditional culture. Unlike food, “media” is considered an innovation of the city and entails the creation of mediated spectacles for consumption. After all, it is the technological affordance of social media that confers mobility on Li, enabling her presentation of a pastoral life to be appreciated by millions of urbanites. In this sense, Li realized the government’s Internet+ strategy by tapping into the potential of interactive media and became a successful cultural entrepreneur. Because of this, she was invited to the “Dialogue between Asian Civilizations”, a conference under the “One Belt, One Road” initiative, and met with the royal family of Malaysia, to whom her handmade stationery was presented as gifts. She also partnered with leading official brands in the preservation of traditional culture, such as the Palace Museum in Beijing, as a government gesture to create more synergy between the official and the grassroots players in the cultural field.
Just like the irony implicit in Li’s role in the campaign against food waste, in which a microcelebrity cultivated by a consumerism-inflected culture was enlisted to fight excessive consumption, here, the latest form of media technology plays a key role in promoting traditional values, such as harmony between humans and nature and filial piety. In fact, the mobility of the new technology facilitates the retrenchment of rural identity. Similarly, identifying Li Ziqi as a role model in the rural rejuvenation drive is a little odd because, after all, Li’s portrayal of the pastoral idyll is far removed from a world of modern farming technologies, which is precisely the centerpiece of the rural revitalization strategy. These little oddities notwithstanding, affirming the state’s commitment to rural development through a popular icon is perhaps the more important message here.
All in all, while the market’s penchant for “a universally human” narrative reduces the texture of rural life into a spectacle for global consumption with its hidden class-based taste preferences, the state’s incorporation of Li into various policy initiatives shows its resolve to reduce the substantive inequality between the country and the city, as well as its intent to promote traditional Chinese culture overseas. In a quixotic way, by making Li Ziqi a social media icon, the market uses the rural as a resource to meet the urban desire for and consumption of the pastoral. Meanwhile the state reappropriates the icon of marketized media to help the disadvantaged rural other regain its agency. Here, the state is trying to play an integrative role that bridges the urban-rural divide, despite the many contradictions during this process.
At a fundamental level, food and media technology occupy opposite ends of the material spectrum and symbolize rural and urban civilization, respectively. When combined in the new cultural form of food vlogging, they mediate the fundamental human aspirations—“the idea of pastoral innocence” versus “the city as a civilizing agency”—in interesting and complex ways. This article examines the rise of food and lifestyle vlogger Li Ziqi, whose “isolated DIY fantasy world offers both dreamy escape and a lesson in self-reliance”
Both the market and the state take an active interest in appropriating the traditional way of Chinese life represented by Li Ziqi, though with different manifestations. This is perhaps natural, considering that both are institutions growing out of urban civilization vis-à-vis the country. Because the social media field largely operates according to the principles of market capitalism, the market’s influence can be felt throughout the celebrification of Li Ziqi. The offering up of the pastoral desire for urban consumption, leading to the reaffirmation of the privilege of the urban, is a familiar line of critique in cultural studies. But the terms of such consumption—that is, the production and dissemination of Li Ziqi’s content—deserves closer scrutiny. As a vlogger, Li’s niche lies in her idealized presentation of rural life, particularly farming activities. But the visualization of her productive activities is more like a new face of consumerism, which is the latest manifestation of the market’s unrelenting quest for novelty and uniqueness. Meanwhile, social media technology, which deterritorializes farming life, provides Li with the capacity to reach her fans around the world while fixing her identity as local, isolated, and uncorrupted by urban influence.
However, the lived experience of the half-billion rural population cannot be merely reduced to a single spectacle. Even across China’s media landscape, the pastoral idyll portrayed by Li has to compete with other images, such as the “carnivalesque rural China” invoked in the Tuwei videos and the “decaying rural China” featured in realism-themed films and literary works. These images present a far less flattering image of rural China, whose identity can no longer be kept intact from the onslaught of urbanization. They also bring into sharp relief social problems, such as the population exodus and the widening urban-rural gap, which call for redress by the state. The contested representations of the “rural other” partly explain the lack of consensus over Li Ziqi’s authenticity within China, which contrasts with her near universal acclaim overseas. Meanwhile, the state is quick to tap into the cultural resonance that Li Ziqi builds with viewers at home and abroad for its own policy agenda.
Since the disembedding of the city from the country, the latter has always been in a subordinate position, whose main role lies in providing material subsistence for the city, which enjoys a more thriving cultural life. But today, in China’s seemingly unstoppable modernization drive (and similarly elsewhere), the alienated urban self seems constantly in need of nourishment by the values that the country stands for while the “backward” country needs material support from the city in the form of advanced science and technology, as well as modern media. Promoting mutual consumption between the country and the city seems to be the implicit message in the Chinese government’s rural rejuvenation design. Here, different from the market’s role in distinction making, the Chinese state tries to position itself as an integrative force, to bridge the urban-rural gap, and to restore the lost agency of the rural population. This will be done through “bringing the urban civilization to the country” in the form of promoting the diffusion of not only science and technology but also new media and the concept of consumerism, so as “to make farming efficient, the countryside good for living, and the country’s peasants rich.”
The convergence of these forces can be gleaned from Li Ziqi’s most recent appearance on Weibo Night in February 2021. As the Chinese microblogging site’s equivalent to the Oscars, the event gathers the most prominent mass media celebrities and newly minted social media microcelebrities, in which Li was awarded “Weibo Person of the Year.” For the occasion, instead of couture gowns, Li wore a rather modest summer mint chiffon dress and a jacket with Chinese embroidery. A hairpin made of bamboo leaves indicated her rustic roots. In interviews with media, she said she was thinking about her grandmother back home and the vegetables she grew in her backyard, which had just sprouted and needed caring. But as she walked the red carpet along with the nation’s hottest media stars—albeit a bit shyly—her role as a “microcelebrity” trumped her role as a “country girl.” Her look for the night was scrutinized against those of other celebrities and made the tabloids’ gossip column in the following days. But the other facet of reality—which is more lackluster—consisted of increasing complaints from consumers online of quality problems found within her brand of food/snacks, whose production she had outsourced to certain factories. A new round of debate on food safety followed, with calls for more government regulation on microcelebrities. So, the story of Li Ziqi goes on, offering us a rich text in studying the “structure of feeling” of our era—namely, the nostalgia for a pristine way of life in late modernity that is being negotiated by various stakeholders, via food vlogging.
Research for this article was supported by the General Research Fund (#11612318) from the Hong Kong SAR Research Grants Council. The author is most grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article, as well as valuable feedback from participants at the Global Storytelling Symposium at Hong Kong Baptist University in January 2020, where an initial version of this article was presented. The author also wishes to thank Xiao Jiasheng for providing research assistance.
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“寻找李子柒家的48小时” (48 hours to Find Li Ziqi’s house). It is unclear who engineered the deletion.
Ramon Lobato, “The Cultural Logic of Digital Intermediaries: YouTube Multichannel Networks,”
Liu Tao, “Duan shipin, xiangcun kongjian shengchan yu jiannan de jieceng liudong” (Short videos, rural spatial production and low class mobility),
David Snow and Robert Benford, “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization,”
Lei Siling, “Li Ziqi zenme jiu bushi wenhua shuchu le” (Why not consider Li Ziqi as a form of “cultural export”?),
Lei, “Li Ziqi.”
“Wo ye man zihao, yinwei wo jiushi Li Ziqi zuoping beijing lide yige dian” (I am very proud, since I am also one dot in the background of Li Ziqi’s video), CCTV News, December 10, 2019,
Xu Xiaohong, “A Very Good Way to Tell China’s Story to the World,”
Zeng Xiongsheng, “Ruxue yu zhongguo chuantong nongxue” (Confucianism and traditional Chinese agriculturalism),
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
Mao Tse-Tung, “On New Democracy” (Xin minzhu zhuyi), in
Florian Schneider,
Zhou Xin, “Is China Rich or Poor? Nation’s Wealth Debate Muddied by Conflicting Government Data,”
John Lui, “Gig Economy: Staying at Home 24/7 Is Now Possible, but Should You?”
“A Special Programme by the Website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection: Follow Li Ziqi in Discovering the Life of Rice,” Website of the State Supervision Commission of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, August 25, 2020,
Frank Tang, “China’s Xi Jinping Vows New Push to Revitalize Rural Economy in Post-Coronavirus World of Uncertainty,”
Li Wei. “Jiemi Li Ziqi baohong beihou de ta: weibo, wanghong datuishou, xinmeiti touzijia” (Uncovering the mysterious man behind Li Ziqi’s rise to fame: Incubator for microcelebrity and investor in the new media),
Tejal Rao, “A Fantasy Princess Living off the Land,”
Orange Wang, “China’s Food Security at Core of Beijing’s New Five-Year Rural-Revitalization Plan,”
Jennifer Hubbert, “Back to the Future: The Politics of Culture at the Shanghai Expo,”